"Anti-Sovietism is the most
important issue in
international relations today".
ISBN 0 907698 04 2 Paper
ISBN 0 907698 03 4 Cased
The frontispiece was designed by
J. Bramwell Slater from a poster featur-
ing Maja Plissezkaja, Prima Ballerina
of the Bolshoi Ballet, published by
the West German Peace Committee,
Cologne and used with its permission.
M. L LAITHWAITE
THE STABLES
DOWN PLACE
HOGS BACK
GUILDFORD
SURREY GU3 IDE
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING
THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SOVIETISM
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Power in Trade Unions (Longmans, 1954)
Trade Union Leadership (Longmans, 1957)
Trade Unions and the Government (Longmans, I960)
Militant Trade Unionism (Merlin Press, 1966)
International Bibliography of Trade Unionism (Merlin Press and
Maspero, 1968)
The Sociology of Industrial Relations (Longman, 1971)
Social Analysis: A Marxist Critique and Alternative (Longman, 1975;
The Moor Press, 1982)
The Militancy of British Miners (The Moor Press, 1981 )
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING
V. L. ALLEN
THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SOVIETISM
THE MOOR PRESS
Published by
The Moor Press
Bank House
Baildon Green.
Shipley. BD 17 5JA
First published 1987
Copyright V L ALLEN, 1987
All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior permission
of the Copyright owner.
ISBN 0 907698 03 4 Cased
ISBN 0 907698 04 2 Paper
Printed in Great Britain by Fretwett & Cox Ltd.,
Goulbourne Street, Keighley, West Yorkshire
To
Sheila,
Sophie
and
Lucy
Contents
Introduction x '
PARTI
THE PREJUDICE OF THE WEST !
Chapter
One:
The Enemy
3
Types of Enemy
3
Enemy by Assumption
7
Two:
The Stereotype
11
The Underlying Belief
11
Inter- War Hostility
13
The Post-War Paranoia
lo
The Stereotype and Internal Repression
17
The Revised Stereotype
19
Three:
The Academics
24
The Dominant Paradigm
24
The Story of Collaboration
26
The Anti-Soviet Socialists
28
The LegitimizeTS of Capitalism
33
The Cost of Dissent
35
The Repression of Academic Dissent in the US
37
PART II
SOVIET REALITY
45
Four:
The Democratic Criteria
47
Diversity
47
Distortion
50
Democracy
51
Dissent in the West
53
Tolerance and Intolerance of Dissent
56
The Question of Emigration
58
Types of Democracy
59
vii
Five: Soviet Democracy 64
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat 65
The One-Party State 67
Dissent 74
The Purges 76
The Ezhovshchina in Perspective 94
The Dissidents 100
Political Opposition 1 17
Forums for Criticism 129
Comparisons 133
Six: The Jewish Question 140
Jews and the Revolution 140
Soviet Jewry in War 143
Western Attitudes to Jewish Refugees 145
The Process of Assimilation 152
The Soviet Attitude to Jewish Emigration 158
The Impact of Aggressive Zionism 161
Organizing Emigration 163
The Pattern of Emigration 168
The Dialectics of the Jewish Question 174
Seven: The Human Rights Issue 181
The Right to Work 182
The Position of Women 184
The Ethnic Minorities 186
The Absence of Imperialism 196
PART III
POWER IN THE USA 205
Eight: The Potsdam Conference: A Spoiled Opportunity 207
The Watershed 212
Nuclear Posturing 215
Nine: The President's Electors 219
Political Responsibility 219
The American Attitude to Politics 221
Consensus and Community Protests 227
Ten: The President's Advisers 231
Institutional Policy-Making 231
The Classic Role of Academics 233
Detente or Containment 235
viii
Eleven: The President's Masters 239
The Valedictory Speech of President Eisenhower 239
The Rhetoric of Presidents 243
US Expenditure on Arms 245
SDI Contracts 248
Arms and the Community 251
Long and Short War Scenarios 254
The Responsibility of the President 258
PART IV
ANTI-SOVIETISM IN PRACTICE 265
Twelve: Trade Unions and Anti-Sovietism 267
The Contradictions 267
The Impact of the Bolshevik Revolution 271
The Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee 275
The Campaign against Communists 277
The Creation of World Trade Union Unity 280
Trade Unions and the Cold War 285
The AFL-CIO 290
Bilateral Trade Union Unity 299
Anti-Sovietism and Class Consciousness 308
Thirteen: The Peace Movement and the Enemy 312
Peace Activity During War 312
Peace Activity in Peacetime 314
The Changed Character of War 316
The Peace Movement 317
Peace as an Antithesis of Capitalism 324
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 326
Nucle ar Pari ty 332
The Soviet Peace Initiatives 338
Index of Names 353
Index of Subjects 359
ix
Charts
Chart 1 : NATO Medium-Range Nuclear Weapons Coverage
of the Soviet Union in 1983. 20
Chart 2: The Principal Nationalities of the Soviet Union 49
Tables
Table I The Distribution of Jews in the USSR according to
the 1979 Census 154
Table II Jewish Emigration from the USSR 1968-1984 169
Table III Soviet Jewish Emigration by Republic 1968-1980 171
Table IV Destination of Soviet Jewish Emigrants by Period 173
Table V Changes in the Number of Welsh Speakers in Wales
1891-1971 190
Table VI Changes in the Number of Gaelic Speakers in
Scotland 1891-1971 191
Table VII Languages of Soviet Islamic Peoples 192
Table VIII Social Indicators for Selected Minorities in the USA
in 1970 194
Table IX Political Labels: which ones stick? 227
Table X Arms Expenditure in the US as a Percentage of the
Gross National Product, 1963-1983 246
Table XI Space Expenditure by the US Government, 1963-1 984 247
Table XII 'Star War' Contracts and Contractors. The largest
prime contractors ranked by total 1985 Strategic
Defence Initiative Awards 249
Table XIII 'Star War' Contracts and Contractors. Total Awards
to date to prime contractors for all projects 250
xi
Introduction
There have been reasons for an analysis of anti-Sovietism ever
since the Bolshevik Revolution almost 70 years ago. Since 1945.
however, when the USA acquired the first atomic bomb, the
need has become increasingly critical. My own reasons for
attempting it lie in that crisis but were given clarity and urgency
by two particular factors which stem from an invitation in 1982
from the Ail-Union Central Council of Trade Unions in Moscow
to write about Soviet trade unions. I visited the Soviet Union to
collect data and consulted all the available Western literature. I
tried to place unions historically in the context of the develop-
ment of Soviet society as a whole. This involved reading the
extensive body of doctoral dissertations which have passed the
scrutiny of external examiners and articles in learned journals
which have been assessed by specialist referees.
It is genera lly recognized that the media, with the sole exception
of the Morning Star, is hostile towards the Soviet Union. This
phenomenon is common-place. We live with it and barely notice
its existence. What is not generally recognized, however, is that
virtually all literature about the Soviet Union contains a bias
against it. It exaggerates the defects of Soviet society and cither
ignores or misrepresents its virtues. A Soviet admission of failure
is perceived as a problem; the recognition of a problem con-
stitutes a crisis. I found then that the academic literature was
equally liable to misrepresent Soviet society as the mass media. In'
a sense it preceded it for much that was generally reported about
the Soviet Union was legitimated by the finely bound volumes
which emanated from universities and research institutes in
Western capitalist societies. This bias was wrapped up in the jargon
of academic disciplines and disguised by claims of impartiality
and objectivity. But this made it more offensive for me. Even-
tually I became more concerned about the distortion of events in
Soviet history than about the events themselves and felt impelled
xiii
to tackle the issue of prejudice against the Soviet Union before I
could proceed with the analysis of trade unions.
I arrived in Moscow early in October 1982 and stayed for more
than three months in order to collect data about trade unionism.
The day following my arrival T sat in the office of the Vice-Rector
of the Higher Trade Union School in Moscow, Professor Marat
Baglai. to discuss my research plan. I wanted to cover as much of
the Soviet Union as possible and to meet people at different
institutional layers from unions, management and the Communist
Party. So he laid a map of the country before me and through
Moscow thus drew lines diagonally across it covering all the main
areas. I visited each of those areas and saw something of all the
regions of the Soviet Union except Eastern Siberia and the far
eastern coast. I went to the institutions of my choice and talked
with whomsoever I pleased.
1982 was a tense year in international relations. Both British
and American governments were abrasive with the Soviet Union.
NATO had decided three years previously to introduce Cruise
and Pershing missiles into Europe and massive peace demonstra-
tions had been held in protest. There were fast-growing Peace
Movements in all the Western European countries chosen for the
missiles. The spectre of a nuclear war began to haunt thinking
people everywhere.
My concern in travelling around the Soviet Union was to ask
questions about unions and their relationships with workers, the
Communist Party and the government, Most people I met,
however, also wanted to ask me questions and almost without
exception these dealt with the issue of nuclear weapons, dis-
armament and the attitude of NATO countries towards the Soviet
Union. Ordinary people everywhere, in the factories, farms,
clinics and shops, showed a deep interest in international politics
and were engaged in an intense and knowledgeable debate about
it.
I was surprised, therefore, to read in the British press on my
return the allegation that the Soviet government prohibited a free
discussion of this vital issue and that there was no Peace Move-
ment which represented the interests of ordinary people. It was
argued that as the Peace Movement agreed with the policy of the
Soviet government it must therefore be 'official 1 and controlled
by it. I decided then to share my experiences of discussions in the
Soviet Union with members of the Peace Movement in Britain. I
visited many CND groups and became active in the leadership of
xiv
national CND. I wrote letters and articles for the press about
nuclear disarmament and the Soviet Union. I gave lectures on the
topic, one of which, given to the J D Bernal Peace Library in
1 983, was published as a pamphlet called Images and Reality in
the Soviet Union.
These activities reinforced my belief that a thorough going
examination of Western attitudes towards the Soviet Union was
necessary. I encountered a disturbing degree of anti-Soviet bias
amongst the national leadership of CND which was not present in
the local groups. But more importantly I came to realize how the
constant misrepresentation of Soviet life had given rise to a
stereotype of the Soviet Union as the enemy of Western capitalist
countries. This stereotype became the justification for the
massive build-up of nuclear arms in the West. The Soviet Union
had always been portrayed as an enemy but with the invention of
nuclear weapons the portrayal was given a new sickening twist.
Insofar as anti-Sovietism was used to justify the production of
nuclear arms then it had become an issue of major international
proportions. Indeed it is now the most important single issue in
contemporary history. This factor added urgency to the task.
The story which unfolded is contained in the following chapters.
Writing it was a constant learning process. T was surprised by the
intensity of the hostility towards the Soviet Union and by the
magnitude of the lies and distortions about it. Intellectually I
knew, of course, that the conflict between the West and the
Soviet Union was about power relations but what in practice did
it entail? What was the meaning of anti-Sovietism? The West's
attitude towards the Soviet Union had no historical antecedents.
It did not contain the usual ingredients in national stereotyping
such as familiarity, close proximity or competition. It was not
about materia] matters such as access to markets or sources of
raw materials.
The pre-eminent quality of the Soviet Union insofar as Western
capitalist societies are concerned is that it is a land without
capitalists. It stands as a model of an alternative form of society to
all the exploited and aggrieved people in capitalist societies. It is,
therefore, by its very existence and without taking any action, a
continual threat to capitalism. Anti-Sovietism is an attempt to
distort and exaggerate that threat by the constant drip of hostile
propaganda, denigrating Soviet principles and practices of govern-
ment, Soviet mannerisms and ideology, indeed all facets of Soviet
life and re-constituting them as alien, hostile, frightening and
xv
threatening to everything good for which Western democracies
are alleged to stand.
Those who defend capitalism by initiating and practising anti-
Sovietism are really protecting their own access to wealth,
privilege and authority but they are not doing it in a conscious.
Machiavellian way. They can beat their breasts and protest their
good intentions in all honesty because anti-Sovietism is a panoply
of self-protective measures which arise out of the system itself.
They do not have to be invented, organized and co-ordinated
though doubtless there are people who think of new ways of
denigration, who devise more effective means of destabilization
and who collect finance to co-ordinate their application. Anti-
Sovietism is an expression of one system of power struggling
against another. As an abstraction it has occurred before. The
transition from a feudal to a capitalist system of power relations
was long and, for many people, painful but there was never a
conscious on-going recognition of a clash of political systems as
there is now. The present transition is distinguished too by the
scale of international communications and the effectiveness of
modern means of information Technology. For this reason anti-
Sovietism has internationally common features and appears as a
planned, concerted and co-ordinated series of actions.
Put in this way anti-Sovietism is an historically inevitable and
inexorable process. Come what may, the holders of power under
capitalism use whatever means they have to retain it and anti-
Sovietism is one such way. It is inconceivable that they would
acquiesce in a workers' revolution or voluntarily accept a
democratic verdict that they should move over for the poor and
exploited. We are continually being made aware of this fact. The
struggle between competing systems of power is occurring and
cannot be glossed over. In this struggle the capitalists are
prepared to take almost unbelievable risks. They are, however,
almost always risks which are borne by others. Millions of poor
people made poorer, millions killed in wars and lies also by the
million published in praise of capitalism and in condemnation of
communism. In its vendettas against humanity anti-Sovietism
puts the Crusades in the shade. But there is now a risk which no-
one can afford to take because there are no havens or off-shore
islands for the refuge of besieged capitalists which would protect
them. Everyone, regardless of class, would be a victim of a
nuclear war in one way or another.
This raises two issues. First, in so far as a dispute between the
xvi
West and the USSR could lead to a nuclear conflict or, through
the accumulation of nuclear weapons to a nuclear accident, then
everyone should be concerned about anti-Sovietism. Indeed,
even so long as nuclear weapons are simply being produced
everyone is affected by anti-Sovietism. People everywhere are
denied resources for social purposes because of arms production.
Those with least in Third World countries suffer most. Anti-
Sovietism, therefore, is not just the concern of political activists.
It plays a vital role in the lives of all people.
Second, conflicts which arise out of the transformation of the
capitalist system and the rise of socialist forms take on a new
frightening dimension with the presence of nuclear weapons.
Capitalists risk destroying what they seek to protect while socialism
becomes possible only if peace is preserved. There have, there-
fore, to be rules governing the relationship between the two
political systems which preclude the use of nuclear weapons. The
most effective rule would be that which abolished nuclear
weapons altogether for so long as they exist, even in small quan-
tities, they can be used. Failing the complete abolition of nuclear
weapons, means have to be devised to prevent the escalation of
conflicts to nuclear ones. It must enter into everyone's conscious-
ness that a new situation exists in international relations which
precludes those old habits and practices which exacerbate
conflicts and encourage wars. Anti-Sovietism is the most dangerous
of them.
I encountered a number of problems in writing about the
Soviet Union. Social research is often just a means of confirming
obvious generalizations. My own investigations did that over the
manner in which prejudice was generated against Soviet com-
munism and the ways in which this led to enemy stereotyping, It
provided me with a factual basis for believing what in general
terms I already believed. In order, however, to test the accuracy
of the enemy stereotyping it was necessary to examine the
elements of Soviet reality which were used for the stereotype.
Here research was truly informative. This can be seen in Part II,
in particular the chapters dealing with Soviet Democracy and the
Jewish Question.
There was a difficulty, however, concerning source material.
Such is the bias against the Soviet Union that the use of Soviet
data is prejudicial for a study for Western readers because they
have been persuaded to be distrustful of it. The impression has
been created that Soviet bureaucracy is continually at work.
XVll
sifting and sorting through the mass of data about Soviet life to
ensure that it makes a favourable public image abroad. The
enemy, it is presumed, must be devious in all things; it can be
trusted over nothing therefore even its data must be unreliable.
On the other hand, Western data about the Soviet Union is so
permeated with prejudice that to use it in an unadulterated form
would simply perpetuate the prejudice. No concepts are immune
to the influence of ideology. Those that concern the Soviet Union
get their meaning, not from empirical evidence, but from the
assumptions initially made about it. If the underlying premise is
that the Soviet Union is "an evil empire 11 or "oppressively
bureaucratic 1 ' or "intolerant of human rights" then everything
subsequently written, every word, statement, conclusion will be
as jaundiced as the initial assumption. What then can someone
who wants to penetrate the reality of Soviet life do about this? Is
ihe reality we perceive so enclosed in two impenetrable ideological
cages that we have to choose one or the other?
It is a difficult problem which is made easier by being aware
that it exists. There arc no more prejudiced writers than the ones
who believe that their work is value-free. I sought a way out of
the dilemma by using information I had collected myself in the
Soviet Union in combination with data from Western sources
where the bias could be detected and isolated. I make no claim
that what I have written in consequence is the truth or correct,
only that it is nearer to reality than the works of those who have
engaged in the business of distortion. In some instances I relied
heavily on Western sources as in the case of Chapter Six 'The
Jewish Question'. On that issue Western analysts have either
ignored the implications of their information so that there is a
dichotomy between their data and their conclusions or thev have
crammed the data into one end of their analytical boxes designed
to pervert the Soviet Union, to come out at the other end as proof
that it is a perversion.
Apart from this difficulty there is a general problem in writing
about the Soviet Union. I am and always have been generally
sympathetic towards its aims. This has not meant that I have
endorsed all its methods or acquiesced in its mistakes. But I have
tried to understand the reasons as a friend for whatever has
happened. This book is a continued attempt at understanding.
My political education began with a curiosity about the Bolshevik
Revolution and was nurtured by the novels of Mikhacl Sholokov
and books such as The Socialist Sixth of the World by Hewlett
xviii
Johnson. I have never ceased to be curious. In so far as every
book is in some ways a reflection of its author this reflects both
my curiosity and my affinity with the Soviet Union. I do not
believe that the Soviet Union is evil, imperialist or in any sense an
enemy of the people in Western capitalist societies. This is not an
act of faith but an analytical conclusion. When the bias is
removed what remains is a country which is trying to create a
society in which people can live without exploitation, discrimina-
tion, deprivation and instability. It has made mistakes and has
suffered lapses but its motives remain commendable.
The problem arises because it is not legitimate within Western
capitalist societies to praise communist practice, whatever form it
takes. In the case of the Soviet Union the assumption is made that
it is evil and repressive so that any comment which contradicts
that is deemed to be either in justification of evil and repression
or a cover-up. Praise of the Soviet Union is a form of heresy. The
problem is then how to write objectively about the Soviet Union,
presenting positive features with negative ones and combining
praise with criticism, in a manner which will avoid an immediate
spontaneous condemnation by the media and the public. How, in
other words, to write so that the prose is read as seriously as it
was intended to be read.
The most heretical assertion of all is to claim that there is a
Soviet form of democracy. My understanding of the democratic
character of the Soviet Union was influenced by the writings of
Lenin and E H Carr. Lenin explained the essence of the new
Soviet state in his polemics against Karl Kautsky. Carr, on the
other hand, took issue only with Karl Popper, the philosopher,
over the meaning of history. In his work on the Soviet Union he
was and remains undoubtedly the greatest Western historian. A J
P Taylor called him simply "the greatest historian of our age". His
vast knowledge of Soviet history was synthesised in a brilliant
series of lectures in February and March 1946 at Oxford when he
analyzed the influence of the Soviet Union on Western capitalist
countries. The lectures w r ere published as The Soviet Impact on
the Western World in 1946. In a brief chapter called "The Political
Impact", Carr placed the Western and Soviet forms of democracy
in their historical and structural contexts so that it was possible to
contrast the qualities of one against the other. He believed that
the Soviet Union was justified in describing its form of govern-
ment as democratic and that it was not in any sense morally
inferior to Western democracy.
xix
Carr's comments were not then regarded as heretical. He wrote
at a propitious time during the brief interregnum between when
the USSR was a wartime ally and a Cold War' adversary. In any
event, his opinions were always weighted by his enormous
intellect and erudition. But even Carr might not have survived
the pressures of the Cold War unscathed. His last book, a
collection of essays called From Napoleon to Stalin, published in
1980 when he was 88 years old, contains a list of his publications
with no reference to The Soviet Impact on the Western World
which, unlike his many other publications, has not been reprinted
since 1947.
I hold a view of Soviet democracy which is similar to that
expressed by Carr though it has been put more aggressively and
polemically than his. It is presented in some detail in Chapter
Five. The gist of it, however, has been published in various forms
since 1980 and on most occasions I have been accused of
behaviour ranging from simplicity to duplicity; from white-
washing "a brutal totalitarian regime" to wanting to take Britain
into it. Correspondents in a letter to The Times on 10 July 1985
used a quotation about Soviet democracy from my pamphlet.
Images and Reality in the Soviet Union, to endorse their
contention that I wanted Britain to become "part of the Soviet
empire 11 . Later that year, on 22 September, The Mail on Sunday
columnist, Alan Williams, made a similar point but under the
heading ''Proved: The KGB links with CND Such assertions are
a part of the "Go back to Moscow" syndrome which derives its
logic from the international communist conspiracy theory. They
are plainly silly but they have the effect of influencing people to
dismiss the writings of anyone who displays friendship to the
Soviet Union as cheap propaganda. The same derisive rhetoric is
not used against non-conformist approaches to other subjects.
Indeed in my own experience non-conformity has often been
praised for its freshness and analytical clarity. Soviet communism
clearly has special hatred inducing qualities for some.
The problem of how to penetrate the barriers of prejudice
remains to be tackled. By definition those who challenge
conventional wisdom are in a minority. Tn this case the minority
has no access to the achievements of information technology. Its
weapons in the struggle of ideas are still those of the Nineteenth
Century advocates of democracy, namely, the public meeting and
the tract. It has to rely on the force of argument and its political
relevance. However, although the means of mass communica-
XX
tions are in the hands of anti-Soviet forces the problem in Britain
may not be quite as acute as appearances indicate. There is still
much to be learned about the determinants of consciousness and
the role played by the media. My impression is that that role is
overplayed.
I have evidence to support this contention. In face to face
discussions at the many public meetings I have addressed I have
never met resistance to listening to arguments in favour of the
Soviet Union. Many people were surprised to hear that there
were plausible alternative democratic forms and that the much
vaunted pluralistic parliamentary and presidential democracies
might be morally inferior to the Soviet model. After each
occasion on which my views about the Soviet Union have been
published in The Guardian I have had letters from dozens of
readers. None has ever been critical. Some have been moving in
their responses. The most telling evidence, however, that the
media stereotype has only superficially penetrated public con-
sciousness comes from the examination of trade union attitudes in
Chapter Twelve. There it is shown that since the October
Revolution in 1917 British workers have possessed an underlying
identity with Soviet workers. Whenever there was an international
crisis such as over Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and
Poland in 1980 public emotions were turned against the Soviet
Union but only temporarily. Long before the incidents became
history they were tucked into the recesses of trade union
consciousness and normal friendly relations were resumed. The
totality of my own evidence suggests that the problem of writers
who wish to put the Soviet case is not overcoming a decpseated
public prejudice but gaining access to the public to correct
superficially held distorted notions about Soviet life. It is perhaps
the recognition of this factor, which means, in effect, that the
British workers are not properly convinced that the Soviet Union
is the enemy, which feeds the desperation of the media defenders
of capitalism.
I have tried to explain the reasons which prompted me to write
this book and some problems encountered in the process of
writing. But what is its purpose? It has two parts. The first is as a
contribution towards lessening the tension between the nuclear
powers by assisting people in the West to see the Soviet Union as
a friendly but critical neighbour and not as an enemy. Only when
this has happened will nuclear tensions dissipate and the world be
safe for social change. The second aim is longer term and is
xxi
dependent upon the fulfilment of the first. It is about social
change. It is to encourage workers in Western capitalist countries
to see the Soviet Union as a positive model for social change. The
stereotype of Soviet communism is used to frustrate all but the
most insipid social democratic changes. Any move which seriously
departs from the ethics of capitalism is dubbed and denigrated as
a Soviet inspired trap for the workers, Only when workers see
Soviet communism as a genuine attempt to improve the material
and emotional lives of people beyond anything which is possible
under capitalism will they begin to break the chains of capitalist
ideology.
Writing this book has been the most exciting and stimulating
project I have ever engaged in. It was urgent and therefore had to
be completed quickly. But it opened up so many issues which
have been sources of great controversy in the British Labour
Movement. Along with the issues came questions about communist
practice which I had not answered previously, in particular those
relating to Soviet democracy. I owe a debt to the hundreds of
people in local CND groups, branches of the British Soviet Friend-
ship Society and the Marxist Forum in Manchester who over the
last 7 years have debated these issues and questions with me.
Throughout the period of writing I have discussed them with Ken
Gill and Michael Seifert and whatever clarity I have owes much to
the Saturday evening debates over dinner we have had. I n addition
they read an early draft of the book and separately made the
same suggestion, that much of it had to be scrapped, The book's
present structure has been based on their advice. It now, I
believe, has a coherence and relevance which it previously lacked. I
hope they think so too when they see the completed book for the
first time on publication. 1 wish to thank them both for the
constant encouragement they gave me. Discussing is one part of
the process; writing is another. But I write with pen and ink in a
barely legible left-handed scrawl which sometimes 1 cannot read
myself. The essential task of transcribing my writing so that
others could read it was done by Sue Logan, always before time. I
wish to thank her as well as Lucy Allen who read the proofs.
Finally, it has been possible, by coincidence rather than design,
to publish this book on the 70th Anniversary of the Bolshevik
Revolution. It is an opportune coincidence. Seventy years is a
brief spell in the history of a society but it is long enough to create
familiarity and to generate acceptance. There are few people in
the West who can remember the Revolution and even less who
xxii
can recall events in Czarist Russia. It is pertinent, therefore, to
ask about the reasons for anti-Sovietism,
The Anniversary raises two factors against which the phenome-
non of anti-Sovietism should be considered. First, the Soviet Union
has survived as a consistent communist society for so long that,
except in the Baltic Republics which became part of it in 1939, the
vast majority of its population has been educated and socialized
through communist values. For them capitalism belongs to history
and other societies. They cannot be nostalgic about what they
have never experienced nor are they likely to be envious of societies
with characteristics, such as mass unemployment and poverty, of
which they disapprove. The Soviet people are committed to the
communist w r ay of organizing their lives. It is dangerous nonsense
to talk, as some politicians do, as if the Soviet people arc waiting
to be liberated. The history of the Second World War should have
been evidence of that fact. There can be absolutely no possibility
of rolling back the 70 years of developments in the Soviet Union.
Secondly, there is now ample empirical evidence to show that
the changes which we define as Soviet communism are part of a
universal process of social change. It is interesting to see this
through the life of one person. My father was 16 years of sge
when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred. When he was born
there was no Communist Party anywhere. The Soviet Union was
the only communist state when he was 38 years at the outbreak of
the Second World War. Yet when he died in 1981 there was a
communist presence in virtually every country of the world and in
an increasing and significant number there were governments
which in various degrees practised communism. Put differently,
until 1939 the Soviet Union was isolated without allies. Now it is a
super-power with allies in all the hemispheres and their number is
increasing. The 70th Anniversary is then a celebration of survival,
of maturity and of expanding comradely friendships. It is in this
context that anti-Sovietism must be analyzed.
V L Allen
1 October 1987
Baildon Green
Shipley.
xxiii
PART I
The Prejudice of the West
Chapter One
The Enemy
Types of Enemy
The Soviet Union is regarded as the enemy of Western capitalist
countries but in what ways and for what reasons? It is said that
every country needs an enemy in order to project and preserve its
own identity and unity. There is a long list of illustrations showing
how those countries which have domestic difficulties divert
attention to external forces. In doing so they generate chauvinistic,
jingoistic attitudes which temporarily over-ride internal divisions.
The USA, with its diverse geography, competitive economic
interests and ethnic complexity, has a clear need for an over-riding
interest to maintain its cohesion as a single, unified nation which
defence against an enemy fulfils. When the US has entered wars,
as in 1917 and 1942, it has done so with extreme, aggressive
nationalistic fervour. Since 1917 it has always had an enemy of
sorts, supplemented in the post Second World War period by a
number of minor enemies such as Cuba. Vietnam, Grenada and
Nicaragua. An enemy for the USA is therapeutic. This is not
quite the case with Britain though the war against the Argentine
over the Falklands in 1982 was a recent sad reminder of the use of
an enemy to divert public attention from deep social and economic
issues. It was, of course, war. national aggression, which created
the shabby unity , not the enemy though an enemy was necessary to
justify the war.
Enemies of this kind emerge in an ad hoc fashion. Their main
qualities must be that they are not truly threatening, are
geographically remote, and give rise to emotional rather than
material consequences. In any event they must not pose the
possibility of defeat and dispossession. In retrospect conflicts with
them appear as a sort of game though this was not the appearance
at the time. War of this kind, moreover must not be unduly
destructive of property.
The Soviet Union is not perceived as an enemy necessary for
nationalistic therapy though anti-Bolshevism and anti-Sovietism
3
have been used, not to achieve national unity, but to suppress
internal dissent. The Soviet Union, and before that Czarist Russia,
has never been a therapeutic enemy. Mr. Lloyd George aptly
described the reason in his Guildhall speech on November 8th,
1919 after a decision had been made to withdraw British troops
from the war of intervention in Bolshevik Russia.
"Our troops are out of Russia", he said, "Frankly I am
glad. Russia is a quicksand. Victories are easily won in
Russia, but you sink in victories, and great armies and
great Empires in the past have been overwhelmed in the
sands of barren victories. Russia is a dangerous land to
intervene in. We discounted it in the Crimea. But true to
the instinct which has always saved us, we never went far
from the sea, and we were able to extricate ourselves
from there . . f 1
Hitler could have echoed Lloyd George's words in 1945, except
that the German armies were far from the sea and sank in the
Russian quicksands.
Nor is the Soviet Union a traditional enemy of Britain. The
choice of enemies in the past has normally been determined by
geo-political factors; by common frontiers and overlapping
interests or competing ambitions. Wars between traditional
enemies have moved frontiers, extended the hegemony of one
country over another, provided labour supplies through enslave-
ment, created outlets for overpopulation or ensured access to
sources of raw materials or new markets. Many countries
bordering each other have traditional hostile relations with each
other. Such is the case with China and Vietnam, Greece and
Turkey and France and Germany. Although many such countries
still oppose each other militarily, guns have in some instances been
replaced by jokes as a more innocuous meansof expressing dislike.
In Central Africa, previously warring tribes have developed joking
relationships to express attitudes of superiority or inferiority.
Maybe French jokes about the English perform this function. The
English prefer to joke about ethnic minorities, the Welsh, Irish and
Scots, whereas in Soviet Union ethnic jokes are often about
Georgians and Armenians. The Russians and the English do not
normally joke about each other. There was a ditty which was
popular in Bolshevik Russia late in 1918 after the British, French,
Italian, American and Japanese had intervened to help the White
Russian armies topple Lenin's government but it was not a joke. It
4
t:
"Uniforms British
Epaulettes from France.
Japanese tobacco
Kolchak leads the dance" 2
But by 1920 this was purely of historical interest. Since then the
Russians and the British have had little need to communicate their
feelings for each other through any medium, except for the episode
of the Second W'orld War when there was a deep sense of
admiration in Britain for the Red Army.
Of course, in order for jokes to have any impact people need to
have some acquaintance with each other. The British and the
Soviet people do not meet except in trickles as tourists after long
and relatively expensive journeys. Britain does not have a common
frontier with Soviet Union at any point. Moscow is 1 549 miles from
London across many frontiers. It is the capital of a distant,
mysterious country. Information about it comes either from the
tales of travellers or through the media.
In war Britain and Russia have been on the same side more often
than not. Russia has never invaded Britain though the horror of
hordes of Russians arriving with snow on their boots is still
conjured as a possibility as if at some time it had been a reality.
Britain has, however, invaded Russia on two occasions. In 1854
British troops invaded the Crimea in an unprepared and futile act
of aggression. In 1918 they entered Russia through Archangel and
Vladivostock and fought with armies of 13 nations against the
Bolsheviks. The British government told the Russian people on
August 8th, 1918: "We are coming to help you save yourselves
from dismemberment and destruction at the hands of Germany.
We wish solemnly to assure you that we shall not retain one foot of
your territory. The destinies of Russia are in the hands of the
Russian people. It is for them, and them alone to decide their
forms of Government, and to find a solution for their social
problems. " The British troops were still in Russia after the war
with Germany had ended, not to protect Russians against
Germans but. in the words of the Chief of the Imperial General
Staff, "to create a ring of States all round Bolshevik Russia ... to
prevent Bolshevism from spreading (and) . . . with a view to
crushing Bolshevism definitely at the earliest possible date. " 4 They
left at the instigation of the Russian people who decided for
themselves that their destiny lay with the Bolsheviks.
5
In the great conflicts in the world since 1800, the Napoleonic
Wars and the two World Wars, Britain and Russia have been allies
and on each occasion the Russian people have suffered greatly in a
cause which benefited us. By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution
in October, 1917, the Russian Army had suffered more fatal
casualties than Britain, France and Italy combined. About 2.8
million Russians were killed, 2.5 million were missing, presumed
dead, and almost 5 million were wounded. Many Russian losses
occurred in order to relieve pressure on the Western front. In the
Second World War, 20 million Soviet citizens died, more than 50
times greater than the American losses in the war. 25 million
people were made homeless."' This was the extent of Soviet
sacrifices to win a war which enabled Britain to survive. There is no
doubt that the outcome of the Second World War would have been
different if the Soviet Union had not defeated the Nazis on their
Eastern front. 90 per cent of all German casualties in the war were
caused by the Soviet armed forces. Mr. Winston Churchill was in
no doubt about the Red Army's contribution when he told
Parliament on August 2nd, 1944 "that the obvious fact . . . (is that)
... it is the Russians who have done the main work in tearing the
guts out of the German army." The Soviet Union w r as clearly not an
ordinary ally in the Second World War.
On this reckoning the Russian have been traditional allies and
not enemies. Yet today the Soviet Union is indicted as an enemy so
evil, so potentially destructive of Western civilization that both
Britain and the USA have refused to say that they will not engage
in a pre-emptive strike with nuclear weapons to destroy it. They
refuse even to accept a moratorium on nuclear tests. So far they
have rejected the Soviet proposal to destroy the arsenal of nuclear
missiles. What kind of society must it be to provoke such hatred
and fear that Britain and the USA are prepared to risk genocide
against themselves in order to protect themselves from it? What
qualities caused the Soviet Union to be transformed from a heroic
ally in 1945 to an implacable enemy in 1946? What is it that has
generated such undiminished hatred from British governments.
Labour and Conservative alike, since that time?
The intensity of Western opposition to the Soviet Union can be
gauged from the scale of investment of resources in the American
Strategic Defence Initiative or the Star Wars programme. ThcSDI
is intended to be a three-layered defence shield against attack from
the Soviet Union. Its effectiveness will depend upon the ability of
the Americans to disable Soviet missiles near to their launching
6
pads, maybe on their launching pads. The first and primary layer of
the shield is therefore a military one over the Soviet Union and not
a protective cover for the USA. In order to construct this nuclear-
powered straight-jacket for the Soviet Union the American
government is prepared to spend, at 1986 prices, up to $1 .5 trillion.
Such costs will jeopardize conventional defence expenditure,
divert resources from social issues, including education, and will in
general create serious destabilizing tendencies in the American
economy. All of this damage, then, to protect itself from the
enemy.
The reasons for ethnic enmity are important at all times but the
advent of nuclear technology has transformed their importance.
The character of war has been changed. War with nuclear weapons
cannot be used as a release valve for a country in crisis by
generating patriotism. A war which destroys all people makes
frontiers irrelevant and market gains unnecessary. Even if the
ghoulish consequences could be discounted a war technology
which is so intensely capital intensive could not be utilized as a
means of breaking out of an economic depression. It is said that
there are American capitalists who would be prepared to
countenance 20 to 40 million American deaths in order to maintain
their control over world markets but as it is highly likely they would
be included in the body count this seems a highly improbable
suggestion. An enemy in the nuclear age is of more significance
than any other enemy in history.
Enemy by Assumption
One would have thought that the question "who is the enemy
and why?" would be uppermost in the minds of people in the West
and at the centre of a continuous debate. After all, Western
societies surely need to be absolutely certain of their ground before
embarking on a course which could lead to the virtual destruction
of human society. It does not require much world-wiseness to see
the criminal futility of arming against a non-enemy, an enemy by
assumption, without any empirical evidence to support the
assumption.
One would have thought, too, that successive British
governments, starting with the Labour government led by Clement
Attlee in 1945, which have committed ordinary people to a nuclear
war strategy, would have paused at every decision-making
stage to say "are we really sure? Does the Soviet Union really
7
pose such a threat as to risk a nuclear holocaust?" In addition, one
would have thought, the same governments would have wanted to
provide information about the Soviet Union in order to provoke an
informed general discussion; in other words to inform and consult
the electorate before embarking on, continuing, accelerating a
build-up of nuclear arms. But for a seemingly unaccountable
reason this has never happened.
Those governments, in fact, did the very opposite. Shabby deals
contracted in high secrecy by cabals of favoured Cabinet Ministers
have been the norm. Neither the British Parliament, nor even the
Cabinet, has ever seriously and profoundly discussed the identity
of Britain's enemy or how it should react to it. In the speedy and
dramatic transition of the Soviet Union from wartime ally to 'Cold
War' enemy, the Prime Minister did not consult the British people,
or even his own party, but engaged in shady, humiliating
diplomatic deals with President Truman.
This crazy, criminally bizarre situation has persisted ever since.
The decision of the Labour government to replace Polaris in 1978,
taken under the code-name Chevaline at a cost of more than £1
billion, was taken by a group of four Cabinet Ministers, without
reference to the Cabinet, Government or Parliament. Tony Benn,
who was a member of that Cabinet, complained that he only
learned about the decision after the defeat of the Labour
Government in 1979. He asked "why have successive governments
. . . misled successive Parliaments about the development of
Britain's nuclear weapons?" and added that "The British
Parliament has never been told the whole truth, and even today,
we do not know under what arrangements American nuclear
missiles in this country are controlled." He said "It is the extra-
Parliamentary powers of successive prime ministers and defence
chiefs, and not the peace campaigners, which threaten
parliamentary democracy. 6 When Mr Denis Healey, who was one
of the four Ministers concerned, responded to Tony Benn's
allegation he said that the decision had been "a mistake" which he
regretted not having investigated more thoroughly. 7 The
enormously costly replacement for Polaris was intended to match
the Soviet ABM system which was never deployed.
The government then, and at other times, used the need to keep
vital information out of the hands of the enemy as the reason for
not informing Parliament or the electorate of its decisions.
Sometimes it engaged in deceit to divert attention from its real
motives. The post-war Churchill government planned the
8
announcement of its decision to build Britain's first nuclear reactor
for civil purposes to deflect public opposition from its nuclear
bomb programme. This became clear after Cabinet papers were
released for public perusal under the 30 year rule. The decision to
manufacture the H-bomb was taken by the Cabinet in July 1954.
Six months later the Cabinet's defence committee decided "that
the time has now arrived where a public announcement of this
decision should be made." Both the Foreign Secretary, Anthony
Eden and the Prime Minister, Mr Churchill were worried about the
effect on the public of disclosure. Mr Churchill noted that "The
Government would be embarrassed if there were any premature
disclosure of this decision . . . there would be an advantage in
publishing the Government's programme for civil development of
atomic energy before announcing their decision to produce therm-
nuclear weapons." 8 The announcement about nuclear power
preceded that concerning nuclear weapons by two days. The issue
was duly clouded.
National security was given as the reason for secrecy at the end
of 1982 when the decision to locate the US European Command
War Headquarters in Britain was leaked to the public through a
report in the Guardian, Mr Michael Meacher, MP, commenting on
this, said "Life and death decisions arc either kept secret from the
British people . . . (as in the case of the Chevaline project) ... or
excluded from a parliamentary vote", as in the case of the decision
to locate Cruise missiles in Britain. 9 Prime Ministers, who have
carried the main responsibility for this insane behaviour, have
acted as if battles were still fought only by professional soldiers
with hand-weapons in field formations. They have behaved as if
democratic decision-making was not only irrelevant for
contemporary warfare, but was subversive. In consequence the
British public has depended upon 'leaks' and gossip for its
information. Politicians have talked to their constituents about
defence through cliches, slogans, smears, innuendos, half-truths
and downright lies.
It is essential that the whole question of nuclear defence is
opened up for public discussion. Decisions which affect the
survival of people should never be taken from their purview.
Secret diplomacy and privileged decision-making arc not simply
inappropriate in the age of nuclear technology but confer
impossible responsibilities on individuals which create their own
grave dangers. All questions concerning war should be public
property. There w r as a possibility of debating nuclear disarmament
9
in the elections of 1983 and 1987 but the issue was spoiled by the
government's use of cliches, Political parties in the main have not
wanted to explore their prejudices concerning international
relations, to examine their assumptions in public, to publicize their
real intentions. The chances are that if this were done the people
would turn away in disgust. That is surely what would have
happened in 1945 if Clement Attlee had informed the British
public that his government was about to embark on a policy of
acute anti-Sovietism.
So, forty-two years after the explosion of the first atomic bomb,
after a continuous accumulation and refinement of nuclear
weapons and after an extension of the arms race into space, the
question still remains to be answered. What kind of enemy is it with
which a country will engage in mutual genocidal conflict. What
hideous qualities does it display? Can it possibly be inhabited by
human beings?
FOOTNOTES
1. History of Anglo-Soviet. Relations by W P and Zelda K Coatcs, 1943, p. 2.
2. The Great Conspiracy Against Russia by Mxhael Savers and Albert E Kahn
1946, p. 66.
3. ibid, pp. 62-3.
4. Secrets from Whitehall and Downing Street, by Fyodor Volkov, 1986, p. 69.
5. Socialism and Capitalism: Score and Prospects "edited by Yuri Sdobnikov
Moscow, 1971, p. 44,
6. The Guardian. 18 December 1985.
7. The Guardian. 20 December !985.
8. The Guardian, 2 January 1984.
9. The Guardian. 18 December 1985.
10
Chapter Two
The Stereotype
The Underlying Belief
The justification for treating the Soviet Union as an enemy lies in
the stereotype which the West has created for that country.
Attitudes towards other societies in general and the myths
displayed about them are often embodied in the stereotypical
terms used to describe their inhabitants. The stereotype of the
Soviet Union does not arise from experience with its people,
however, no matter how jaundiced, as in the case of the Germans!
French, Italians and Japanese. It is portrayed as a system run by a
bureaucracy. It has no heart and, because it is godless, no soul
either. It has in consequence no sensitivities and no matter how it
may be savaged it feels no pain and cannot weep. When Soviet
mothers weep over the graves of the Second World War dead, they
weep ? it is claimed, only crocodile tears. 1 There is no need even for
a flicker of conscience at the obliteration of this socialist sixth of the
world.
The meaning of the Western contrived stereotype of the Soviet
Union is expressed by President Reagan's description of the Soviet
Union as an "evil empire" and Mrs Thatcher's comment that it is
"brutal and tyrannical". Both statements are sloganized
expressions of the deeply embedded, pervasive, historically
determined and formally sanctioned views of the Soviet Union by
Western capitalist countries. President Reagan's comment is an
expression of the continuing official US Congress view that the
Soviet Union is responsible for international communism which it
equates with totalitarianism, terrorism and brutality. This is clearlv
expressed in the Congressional Preamble to US laws on Internal
Security, published in 1976, which states: 2
"As a result of evidence adduced before various
committees of the Senate and House of Representa-
tives, the Congress finds that —
(1) There exists a world Communist movement which,
in its origins, its development, and its present practice, is
11
a world-wide revolutionary movement whose purpose it
is, by treachery, deceit, infiltration into other groups
(governmental and otherwise), espionage, sabotage,
terrorism, and other means deemed necessary, to
establish a Communist totalitarian dictatorship in the
countries throughout the world through the medium of a
world-wide Communist organization.
(2) The establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship in
any country results in the suppression of all opposition to
the party in power, the subordination of the rights of
individuals to the state, the denial of fundamental rights
and liberties which are characteristic of a representative
form of government, such as freedom of speech, of the
press, of assembly, and of religious worship, and results
in the maintenance of control over people through fear,
terrorism and brutality.
(3) The system of government known as a totalitarian
dictatorship is characterized by the existence of a single
political party, organized on a dictatorial basis, and by
substantial identity between such party and its policies
and the government and governmental policies of the
country in which it exists.
(4) The direction and control of the world Communist
movement is vested in and exercised by the Communist
dictatorship of a foreign country.
(5) The Communist dictatorship of such foreign
country, in exercising such direction and control and in
furthering the purposes of the world Communist
movement, established and causes the establishment of,
and utilises, in various countries, action organizations
which are not free and independent organizations, but
are sections of a world-wide Communist organization
and are controlled, directed, and subject to the
discipline of the Communist dictatorship of such foreign
country."
All-in-all there are 15 paragraphs in this section of the Code,
expressing, emphasizing, repeating the conspiracy theory which
locates the source of discontent in the USA, and elsewhere in the
world, in Moscow. They are used to justify the internal repression
of communist activities and to legitimize external military action to
stop communist influence from spreading. President Reagan
12
has said, for example, that action against the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua is necessary to prevent the spread of
Soviet influence. The same reason is given to justify American
support of insurgents in Mozambique. Wherever indigenous
conditions give rise to revolutionary activity the American
governments sees the hidden hand of that "evil empire".
Inter- War Hostility
This paranoia about the Soviet Union is not new and is mild in
comparison with what was said at other times. It began with the
Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and has dominated Western
thinking, education and even information about the Soviet Union
since then. The images of Bolshevism, created when the Bolshevik
government was struggling for its existence in a contracting
segment of Russia, have become imprinted on people's minds
through constant and sophisticated repetition.
For virtually the whole of i ts existence the Soviet Union has been
regarded with anathema. There was some rejoicing in the West,
especially in the USA. when the Russian Czar Nicholas TT was
deposed in February 1917 but this was replaced by apprehension
when the Bolshevik Party assumed power in October of that year.
The apprehension turned to fear when it seemed that Bolshevism
would survive. From early in 1918 fear generated hostility and
hostility legitimized the perversion of the truth.
From the time of the Bolshevik Revolution until the end of the
First World War, the Bolsheviks were branded as agents of the
German Kaiser and under his control. At that time, however, they
were viewed as transient participants on the world stage. The
American mind was concentrated on defeating the German enemy
though occasionally the American press took time off to brand the
Bolsheviks as even worse enemies than the Germans. Once they
had entered the war in 1917, the Americans worked with amazing
speed in establishing governmental, public and media agencies to
foment anti-Germanism. But as soon as the war was over these
agencies, namely the National Security League, the American
Defence Society and the American Protection League, which had
converted ordinary Americans into super-patriots and German
spy-chasers set about transforming them into Bolshevik haters.
Horror stories appeared in the press claiming that Bolshevik rule
was a compound of slaughter, confiscation, anarchy and universal
disorder and describing Bolshevik leaders as "assassins and
13
madmen 11 , "human scum", "crime mad" and "beasts". The New
York Times had a headline in the spring of 1919 "Russia under
Reds a Gigantic Bedlum" while the London Daily Telegraph
reported a reign of terror in Odessa followed by a "free love
week". It was alleged by the Daily Telegraph in 1920 that Russian
women had been nationalized. Particular attention was given to
lurid stories about the fate of bourgeois women and girls.
The political leaders of the great powers turned their attention to
the Bolsheviks at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. With
revolutions erupting in Germany and Hungary and unrest
manifesting itself in Britain and the USA, the conspiracy theory
took form. The weak, struggling Bolshevik government, harassed
by invading armies and Civil War, was identified as the nerve
centre for social disorders throughout the world. The French
Ambassador to Russia, M Noulens, told the Peace Conference
that "the Bolshevik Government is definitely imperialistic. It
means to conquer the world, and to make peace with no
Government." 3 In Western minds it never ceased to act that part.
The hostility of the Western powers was expressed in various
ways, apart from making military and economic threats. The
media distortions continued, as did the periodic vitriolic
denunciations by politicians- By the middle of the 1920s, the
distortions had already become so commonplace that they were
being passed off for truth without any attempt at verification. This
subtle form of propaganda was illustrated by comments on Soviet
Russia by John Maynard Keynes, the influential economist.
Writing from the sanctuary of Kings College, Cambridge in 1925,
he stated: "I am not ready for a creed which does not care how
much it destroys the liberty and security of daily life, which uses
deliberately the weapons of persecution, destruction, and
international strife. How can I admire a policy which finds a
characteristic expression in spending millions to suborn spies in
every family and group at home, and to stir up trouble abroad?" 4
He provided no supporting evidence or references, an omission he
would have regarded as intellectually dishonest in his own field of
economics. His prejudice even interfered with his perception of
people for when he spoke to Russian communists he could see "the
full faith of fanaticism in their eyes". 3 At this stage the process of
social conditioning was in full swing.
American trade unions were excessive in their condemnation of
the Soviet Union for at the 1928 Convention of the American
Federation of Labour, they branded it as "the most unscrupulous,
14
most anti-social, most menacing institution in the world today",
though they had no experience of Bolshevism. The US
Government only recognized the Soviet Union in 1933 and was the
last major power to do so. The minority British Labour
Government recognized the Soviet Government in 1924 amidst
much controversy, fuelled by the fraudulent "Zinoviev" letter in
September 1924 which effectively caused the government to be
defeated in the general election of the following month.
Diplomatic relations between the two countries were ruptured in
1927 but resumed in 1929 when the second Labour Government
was elected.
The diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by Western
capitalist countries did not signify their acceptance of Bolshevism
but merely altered the nature of diplomatic and trading
relationships. Their basic hostility towards the Soviet system
continued. Only their methods changed. The intervention of
troops from 14 nations, but mainly from Britain, France, USA,
Japan and Czechoslovakia, in support of the insurgent Czarist
Generals, which started in February 1918 and lasted for 3 years,
converted a virtually bloodless Revolution into a bloodbath. It
caused a dislocation of transport and of food production on such a
scale that in 1921-22 there was a famine in which an estimated 20
million Russians died. The cost to Soviet Russia of Western
hostility was phenomenal in terms of destruction, chaos, human
suffering and the organization of Soviet society in general.
Military intervention was superceded by economic sanctions.
The economic war was particularly nasty as the details recounted
by Andrew Rothstein indicate: 'in 1930 they included a campaign
in Great Britain and elsewhere against alleged religious
persecution in the USSR and, later in the year, against alleged
"dumping" of Soviet wheat and timber: both with the declared
object of inducing business interests not to trade with the Soviet
Government. Some success outside this country was won by these
campaigns. In October, 1930, France instituted an economic
blockade of Soviet goods, and early in 1931 Canada followed suit.
The existence of the Labour Government in Britain, which signed
a trade agreement with the USSR in April 1930, for a time
interfered with the campaign in this country ; but in February 1931 ,
leading politicians and businessmen formed a "Trade Defence
Union" for the express purpose of combating trade with the USSR
and in November of the same year the British National Govern-
ment ... cut the duration of export credits on Soviet imports from
15
two years to one. Throughout 1931-2 the Bureau of Research on
Russian Economic Conditions of Birmingham University
published eight memoranda proving the failure and collapse of
Soviet economic efforts; and in 1932 a new campaign against Soviet
goods was started in Great Britain, on the grounds that they were
allegedly produced by "forced labour". When the campaign had
been worked up to a considerable height the Anglo-Soviet trade
agreement of 1930 was denounced by the British Government." 6
The Western powers created a cordon sanitaire around the
Soviet Union and treated it as a pariah amongst nations. Anti-
Sovietism was spread through the media: films and radio were used
to create images in the minds of people about the evils and
degeneracy of communism. Lurid, distorted and exaggerated tales
were told in the 1930s about the process of collectivisation,
membership 'purges' in the Communist Party and the "Great
Trials' of 1936 and 1937. In a carefully prepared broadcast on 20
January 1940, Mr Winston Churchill was able to say, without
serious contradiction, "Everyone can see how Communism rots
the soul of a nation , how it makes it abject and hungry in peace and
proves it base and abominable in war." 7 This was only 18 months
before the Soviet Union became Britain's great and indispensible
ally in war.
The Post- War Paranoia
The wartime experiences, which had such a profound effect
upon the perceptions of ordinary people made not a dent in the
anti-Soviet intentions of the Western political leaders, except
those of Franklin D Roosevelt the US President who did not live to
influence post-war events. Once the war was over the old
rhetoric re-appeared as if there had been no interlude but this time
the anti-Soviet pace was set by Americans. Averill Harriman, the
US Ambassador to Moscow, warned the newly installed President
Truman on 20 April, 1945, that the US was faced, in effect, with a
"barbaric invasion of Europe', that Soviet control over any
foreign country did not mean merely influence on their foreign
relations but the extension of the Soviet system with secret police,
extinction of freedom of speech, etc . . ." 8 The US foreign policy
adviser, George F Kennan and US Ambassador in Moscow after
Harriman, was a consistent advocate of containment of the Soviet
Union during the war and after it. On 22 February 1946 he
despatched a long telegram from the US embassy in Moscow to
16
Washington in which he explained: "At the bottom of the
Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and
instinctive Russian sense of insecurity . . . they have always feared
foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world
and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth
about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world
within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but
deadly struggle for total destruction rival power, never in compacts
and compromises with it . . ." 9 For this telegram Kennan achieved
fame and influence for with it he set the post-war parameters of the
US foreign policy. Soviet aggression, he stated, could not be
allayed by concessions; it had to be contained by force. He
modified the stereotype by rejecting the notion that there was a
basic antagonism between the capitalist and socialist worlds and
this enabled him to say "that the stress laid in Moscow on the
menace confronting Soviet Society from the world outside its
borders is founded not in the realities of foreign atagonism but in
the necessity of explaining away the maintenance of dictatorial
uthority at home." 10 His intellectual argument legitimized the
If-righteous approach to relations with the Soviet Union which
the US and Britain have never deserted. Mr Winston Churchill
took up the Kennan thesis in his speech in Fulton, USA on March
5th 1946. He talked of the "iron curtain" which had descended
across Europe and spoke of the need for a partnership between
Great Britain and the US to halt the Soviet colossus. There is
nothing the Russians "admire so much as strength", he said, "and
there is nothing for which they have less respect than military
weakness". For that reason the old doctrine of a balance of power
was unsound. 1 1 Much detail was added to the 1918 stereotype as a
result of Soviet successes in the Second World War which
portrayed the Soviet Union as an infinitely more dangerous and
implacable enemy. The Cold War was underway.
The Stereotype and Internal Repression
The stereotype became an ogre when it was used to justify
interna! repression against radicals, trade unionists and communists.
Paragraph (9) of "Title 50, War and National Defense in the US"
stated "In the United States those individuals who knowingly and
willfully participate in the world Communist movement, when
, so participate in effect repudiate their allegiance to the
" ed States, and in effect transfer their allegiance to the foreign
17
allegiance to the foreign country in which is vested the direction
and control of the world Communist movement". Paragraph (11)
added "The agents of communism have devised clever and
ruthless espionage and sabotage tactics which are carried out in
many instances in form or manner successfully evasive of existing
law." These agents, the remaining paragraphs explained, enter
the USA with diplomatic or semi-diplomatic status, or as
deportable aliens. "One device for infiltration by Communists",
paragraph (14) stated, 'is by procuring naturalization for disloyal
aliens who use their citizenship as a badge for admission into the
fabric of our society." The sentiments underlying these para-
graphs were a reality for many thousands of people during the
Red Scare period from 1918 to 1924 and after the Second World
War.
The image of a voracious Bolshevism sanctioned the wholesale
oppression of political nonconformity in the USA in 1919. Police
raids, arbitrary arrests, excessive prison sentences and physical
violence were everyday risks for those who questioned the
legitimacy or relevance of American capitalism. In May, 1918 a
Federal Sedition Act was passed which made it a crime to utter,
print, write or publish any "disloyal, profane, scurrilous or
abusive language intended to cause contempt, scorn, contumely
or disrepute as regards the form of government of the United
States, or the Constitution, or the flag, or the uniform of the
Army or Navy ..." and so on. 12 By 1920 the majority of states
had passed similar legislation directed at working class radical-
ism. Thirty-three states had passed legislation which even forbade
the display of the red flag. It became illegal in many states to wear
red ties or display buttons which were emblems of Bolshevism.
There was a lengthy catalogue of convictions for displaying red
flags, possessing radical literature, uttering comments critical of
the state, belonging to revolutionary organizations. People with
Russian sounding names and aliens in general who supported
radical causes were particularly harassed and frequently
deported.
Under the mantle of a crusade against Bolshevism in the USA
Communist Party membership fell from 70,000 after being
founded to about 12,000 in 1922; the Socialist Party membership
fall was greater, from 110,000 in 1919 to 12,000 in 1922 while the
militant Industrial Workers of the World was almost completely
destroyed by systematic large scale arrests. 13 Coincident with the
oppression of radicals was the rise of the right-wing paramilitary
18
groups, the American Legion and the Ku-Klux Klan.
There was not a comparable scare in Britain though the British
government in 1919 was extremely apprehensive about rcvolu-
tionarv activity. Throughout, the British pursued the same aims
as the' Americans but more subtly. After the Second World War
the pattern of the Red Scare was repeated in the USA and
progressive politics, still suffering from the Red Scare, was
virtually crushed by McCarthyism, as almost all types of political
nonconformists were hounded out of their jobs and harassed in
their social lives. The greatest sufferers were communists, many
of whom were sent to Prison. 14 Again the policy of deportation of
non-citizens was pursued. British communists suffered some
discrimination after 1945. In general they survived but as a fringe
group in politics.
The Revised Stereotype
Once the Soviet Union had tested its first nuclear weapon in
1949 anti-Sovietism was used for more sinister and macabre
purposes. The military superiority which the USA believed the
atomic bomb gave it from 1945 suddenly slipped away, never to
be regained in the foreseeable future. The Americans, thereafter,
could onlv reassure themselves of their superiority by producing
bigger, more deadly, more elusive and more numerous bombs
than the Soviet Union possessed. What began was an arms build-
up not an arms race for, except for the launching of the Sputnik
satellite in 1957, the Soviet Union did not initiate any nuclear
weapon development. It sought parity but this upset the balance
as perceived by the US which went in further search of
superiority. Military considerations, plus market ones for nuclear
arms production became an extremely lucrative activity for the
privately owned armaments manufacturing industry in the US,
gave the manufacture of nuclear weapons a dynamic which
became independent of external factors. The American military-
industrial complex, in its single-minded pursuit of the twin
objectives of military superiority and private profit, was largely
insulated from world opinion, international pressure and Soviet
overtures. Its main sensitivity was in response to American public
opinion. It had to justify the colossal use of resources for such
universally lethal purposes. And it did so by revising the
stereotype of the enemy, adding new myths concerning military
might and a reckless disregard for the fate of the world to the old
19
ones about international political conspiracies. The new stereo-
type was not about w r orld conquest but world destruction.
" The makers of US foreign policy and their NATO cohorts
redrew the image of the Soviet Union with a deft use of lies, half-
lies, distortion and exaggerations into a rampaging international
ogre. Dr Steve Smith put the issue and details of the myths more
soberly but admirably in a powerfully argued article as follows: 16
"By myth, is meant a popular fictitious narrative. Thus,
in talking of the myths surrounding the debate on the
Soviet threat reference is made not to the fact that
politicians or academics say things that are
controversial -such is the essence of political debate-
but that they make seemingly factual statements that
are, in fact, incorrect. What are these myths? There are
four which are, in increasing order of generality:
— That the Soviet Union spends much more of its
GNP on defence than do the leading powers of
the West (thereby justifying vast increases in
our defence expenditure).
— That United States Tnter-Continental Ballistic
Missiles (ICBMs) are now or soon will be
vulnerable to a Soviet first strike (thereby jus-
tifying M-X and the deployment of Cruise).
— That the Soviet Union has a view of warfighting
that "accepts" nuclear war as inevitable and
potentially winnable (thereby requiring a move
towards a nuclear war-fighting strategv in the
West).
— That the Soviet Union is embarked on a world-
wide expansionist and aggressive foreign
policy— as witnessed by Afghanistan (thereby
justifying real increases in NATO defence
expenditure and the development of a Rapid
Deployment Force (RDF) for use outside the
boundaries of NATO -specifically in the
Gulf)."
The assumption underlying the entire Western defence strategy
is that ultimately and inevitably the Soviet Union will wage
nuclear war against NATO. It is this projected belief which is
given as the public justification for the Star Wars Programme.
Other distortions, however, have not been neglected. One in
21
particular, concerning human rights in the Soviet Union, projecting
it as a uniquely oppressive society, has been specially revived to
undermine the efforts of the Western Peace Movements to
change American and NATO military policies. In an important
respect this is the most vital of the elements which make up the
stereotype for it contorts the minds of ordinary people about the
Soviet Union. "Evidence" is produced about the treatment of
Soviet dissidents to confirm that conformity in the Soviet Union,
acceptance of the communist system, only occurs through the
physical suppression of individuals by the KGB, other state
agencies and the Communist Party. The system of institutional-
ized pluralism which accommodates a diversity of views is
contrasted with a Soviet monolith which behaves like Proscrustes,
the robber of Attica, who fitted his victims to the length of his bed
by stretching them or cutting off their legs or heads.
So long as people in general in the West perceive the Soviet
Union as "brutal and tyrannical" they will tend to see sense in
efforts to contain and resist it, no matter how extreme they might
be. Only a "brutal and tyrannical" system would contemplate
committing genocide with nuclear weapons; only such a system
would resist reasonable efforts to spread democracy and bring
peace to the world. But if this perception of the Soviet Union
were altered and ordinary people began to sec the Soviet system
in an enviable, even positive light, then the whole ideological
edifice of Western military policy would begin to collapse.
The Western stereotype of the Soviet Union, then, is pivotal in
the defence of Capitalism, not simply against socialism but from
its own contradictions. Tt is the justification for taking the world
to the brink of a nuclear war. If the stereotype is a correct
reflection of reality, however, there is no hope for the world
anyway. The Soviet Union will strike and the West will retaliate
and that will be the end. But if the stereotype is false, a reversal
of the truth, yet the West causes a nuclear war because of it then
it will have wreaked destruction on a largely innocent world
because of a mistake— the most colossal, horrendous mistake in
the history of the world. Tt is obviously important to know more
about the stereotype. How is it constructed? Is it a correct
reflection of Soviet society? How does it affect our lives?
FOOTNOTES
1 . See for example comments about "weeping Soviet grandmothers'* by
E P Thompson in The Guardian, February 21 , 1983.
22
2, United States Code, 1976 Edition, Title 50. War and National Defence,
Chapter 23. Sec 781 , p. 1894.
The Great Conspiracy Against Russia by Michael Sayers and Albert
E Kahn, 1946, p. 78. See also Memoirs of a British Agent by R H Bruce
Lockhart for details of Noulens' activity in Bolshevik Russia.
4. "A Short View of Russia (1925)"'. in Essays in Persuasion bv John
Mavnard Keynes. 1931 , pp. 299-300.
5. ibid. p. 305.
6. Man and Plan in Soviet Economy by Andrew Rothstein, 1948, pp. 24-25,
See also History of Anglo-Soviet Relations by W P and Z Coates, Chapters
XV to XVIII.
7. ibid, p. 90.
8. The Origins of the Cold War by Martin McCaulcy , 1 983, p. 105.
9. ibid. p. 113.
10. American Diplomacy by George F Kennan, 1984, p. 1 13.
11 . McCauley, op cit, p. 1 15.
12. Human Rights in the Soviet Union by Al Szymanski, pp. 164-5.
13. See Szymanski, op cit; also Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria by
Robert K Murray, 1955 and We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial
Workers of the World by Melvin Dubofsky, 1969.
14. See The Great Fear by David Caute, 1978: Naming Names by Victor
S Navasky. 1980 and Szymanski, op cit, pp. 175-187.
15. Source: Disarmament: Who's Against? Military Publishing House.
Moscow, 1983, pp. 32-33, Adapted for use here by the Graphics
Department of the University of Leeds.
16. "The Myth of the Soviet Threat" by Steve Smith, in the Journal of the
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, June 1982, pp. 41-49.
23
Chapter Three
The Academics
The Dominant Paradigm
The stereotype of the Soviet Union as the implacable enemy
interacts with the view which many ordinary people in the West
have of the Soviet Union. That is, it both reflects that view and
endorses and consolidates it. Indeed the government would not
be able to sustain the contention that the Soviet Union were the
enemy unless its constituents also believed that to be the case.
The views of ordinary people, therefore, and how they are
formed and sustained are an important part of the defence
mechanism of the system. They are not left to chance.
The picture of the Soviet Union and of Soviet people which is
conjured up in the minds of people in capitalist societies is formed
by a continual presentation of interpretations about it, depicting
its life, its institutions, its morality, its intentions. These interpreta-
tions enter the consciousness of people through the usual ways in
which ideas are communicated, through the written and spoken
word via newspapers and journals, radio and television, videos
and films, novels and text books. Through these channels a
picture is formed which becomes the basis for conversation about
the Soviet Union and is communicated to children and kinsfolk in
general. It enters into the educational system where it is re-
inforced by text books. Eventually the picture becomes folklore.
Images of the pictures enter language and are reflected in words
and concepts.
This ideological process works subtly on the mind until it enters
the consciousness of each person. In doing this it becomes a part
of the dominant paradigm. In other words it helps to form the
linguistic terms of reference which act as the basis for their
perception of events and in doing so both defines the questions
people ask of Soviet situations and presents them with the
answers. It is dominant in the sense that it has priority over all
other views in all the channels of communication and this is
because it reflects the attitudes of the dominant bourgeois class
24
towards the Soviet Union. In some societies in some periods it
has such absolute prioritv that no other views can be expressed
except at the risk of punishment. But this is an extreme and
tenuous situation for it indicates that the society can only survive
if protected by physical coercion. A society is in its healthiest
condition when its dominant protective ideas act on people's
consciousness so that they think that the ideas are their own. It
then so formulates the answers that when issues arise about, say,
the Soviet Union, individuals have 'instant' explanations. They
do not have to think a question out or delay a comment until
some information has been collected. They draw on the image
which has been created for them but which they now believe
constitutes their own opinion. Opinion-forming is a very devious
process for people can communicate ideas which they believe are
their own but which reflect the interests of others. This is often
the case in class dominated societies such as Britain and the USA.
An example of the lengths to which this opinion forming
process can go was provided by Professor I Rabi of Columbia
University, a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics in 1944 and a
Presidential Adviser. He said "From the beginning we have
coupled how terrible the weapons are with how terrible the
Russian are. So the more you describe the horrors of nuclear war,
the more you fear the Russians. One doesn't even think of them
as human at all; the diabolical Russian ... We have wasted our
substance now for 30 years and more fighting some phantom
Russian . . . There are people in this country who hate Russians
more than they love America." 3 The former New York Times
correspondent in Moscow, David K Shipley, described how-
media copywriters went about this task when he wrote that
"Vicious and absurd caricatures of Russians have become
standard fare in a current genre of commercials and films.
Russians are made to look like the Nazis and even speak with
German accents". 2 This process reached the level of absurdity in
the USA in the 1980s with the production of such crudely anti-
communist and anti-Soviet films as Rambo and Amerika.
Fortunately the authority of a dominant paradigm is never
absolute. Where it does not reflect the actual experiences of
people and appears to misrepresent them and, therefore, to
mislead them, then it tends to become displaced and people look
for alternative explanations. The displacement of inappropriate
ideas is continuallv underway but it is a long process, proceeding
unevenly and erratically. But it does mean that if the view of the
25
Soviet Union as the enemy does not reflect the reality of the
position of the Soviet Union, it will have only a tenuous hold on
the imaginations of people. The more it is shown to be false then
the more people will discard it, not all at once, but by questioning
its relevance in bits and pieces until it all falls apart.
In the meantime, however, the commonly held perception of
the Soviet Union performs the dual function of reinforcing the
stereotype and of acting as an obstacle to understanding it. If
people want consciously to understand the Soviet Union what
should they believe, who should they believe, to whom should
they turn for the truth? How can they penetrate the propaganda
which has been layered on for decades? Should they turn to the
experts, the Sovietologists, the Kremlinologists, who have re-
searched the Soviet Union in all of its facets and have produced
libraries of footnoted texts? And if they do turn to them what will
they find?
The Story of Collaboration
What they will find is a story of collaboration with the
establishment. Academic studies in general do not escape the
taint of political manipulation. But in Soviet studies it is obviously
and grossly present. Soviet studies, virtually alone amongst
academic disciplines, are pursued, in the main, by people in
universities and research institutes who are hostile to the subject
of their research. The function of the experts in Soviet studies has
always been to give intellectual legitimation to the stereotype.
Indeed it is more than that for without the credibility which the
multiplicity of research monographs provide, the stereotype
would collapse. Notoriously, many doctoral dissertations about
the Soviet Union have contributed to the subversion of that
country. Very few monographs adopt even a dispassionate view
of the Soviet Union and even less have positive comments to
make about it. 3
In the USA the bulk of the funds to finance research
institutions and research projects dealing with the Soviet Union
comes from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the US
State Department, supplemented anonymously by the Central
Intelligence Agency. British research is conducted mainly in
three specially designated centres, namely the School of Slavonic
Studies in the University of London, the Institute of Soviet and
East European Studies at Glasgow University and the Centre for
26
Russian and East European Studies at Birmingham University.
Of these three, the Birmingham Centre, since it was directed by
professor Alexander Baykov in the 1950s, has contributed most
towards understanding the Soviet system. By comparison with
that in the USA British research is poorly endowed but it too
depends on the government and large foundations for its funding.
The intention of the donors is to draw extra lines in the
stereotype, to make it clearer and more easily recognizable and
the researchers frequently oblige. The work is done in strict
conformity with the practices of social science research except
that it is started from a hypothesis about the Soviet Union which
is merely confirmed. All the ritual of uncovering sources,
collecting and collating data and laboriously drawing conclusions
is followed. The final results appear in footnoted texts between
neatly and often expensively bound covers. They look
impressive. 4
It is incredibly difficult to find scholarly works in the USA or
Britain which portray the Soviet Union in a sympathetic light.
The most impressive recent American writer is Albert Szymanski, a
sociologist from the University of Oregon, who in the course of
writing h the Red Flag Flying? m the middle 1970s purged himself
of prejudice about the Soviet Union. He went on to write a
balanced account of human rights in the USA and the Soviet
Union called Human Rights in the Soviet Union. 5 Szymanski
risked the wrath of the US educational establishment with these
works. Sadly he committed suicide early in 1985.
More names make up the British list but they tend to be
concentrated in the generation which graduated well before the
onset of the Cold War. The most notable of them have been
Maurice Dobb 6 , Andrew Rothstein 7 , Sidney and Beatrice
Webb 8 T and E H Carr, pre-eminent as an historian of the
Bolshevik Revolution but also the author of the most lucid
analysis of the Soviet impact on the West. 9 The most recent
example of a dispassionate analysis of Soviet affairs is the lengthy
two-volumed study of the Soviet Union's war with Germany by
John Eriekson, The Road to Stalingrad, 1975, and The Road to
Berlin, 1983. There is also a small group of British writers who
contribute to our understanding of the Soviet Union but who in
varying degrees fail to shake off the influences of bourgeois social
science. The most prominent of these are Robert Davies, David
Lane, and Mary McAuley. 10
There are two other categories of academics who subscribe to
27
the formulation of the stereotype. There are those who do so out
of conformity with the capitalist system or its institutions such as
Western democracy but without a perverse interest in the Soviet
Union. This category has many meinbeTS from the social sciences.
And there are those who regard themselves as a part of the
Labour Movement but who do not consider for different reasons
the Soviet Union as a socialist society. These emphasize the areas
where it is claimed the Soviet Union has deserted or distorted or
maligned socialist principles. The details of the criticism in all
cases are similar but they supplement each other even when they
differ. They are not of equal importance, however. The main
body of criticism arises from pressures for conformity within the
system. It is this which has priority in the communications
channels and becomes part of the dominant paradigm. It most
neatly reflects the interests of private capital. The criticisms from
within the Labour Movement confirm the stereotype created by
the main group. They do not have a separate identity but they are
important in that they are directed at people who, other things
being equal, are most likely to be sympathetic to the Soviet
Union. They reflect ideological divisions which have occured in
socialist movements.
The Anti-Soviet Socialists
The primary ideological distinction within the Labour Move-
ment is that between communism and social democracy. Its basis
is analytical, involving different, contradictory perspectives of
reality. It is not simply about attitudes towards the Soviet Union.
Indeed these are by-products of profound theoretical differences
about property relations in capitalist societies.
Communists recognize that capitalist property relations, namely
the private ownership of the means of production, form the
structure of capitalism and, therefore, have a causal significance
for everything which happens in capitalist societies. The impact of
private ownership is mediated through the class divisions which it
creates. It is not possible to make analytical sense of anything
under capitalism without first asking questions about class. It is
not possible to solve any social, economic or political problems,
therefore, without first removing their class causes and this
involves changing the ownership of property from private to
public. Historical experience has shown that this has not normally
been achieved by evolutionary means through parliamentary
28
democratic procedures.
Social democrats on the other hand, see capitalism as a
composition of pluralistic interest groups. There is class conflict
but also many other conflicts of equal causal value. Each of these
conflicts can be treated without reference to the others. Thus the
evils of capitalist societies can be remedied through a process of
social engineering involving a series of short-run adaptations such
as partial public ownership, protective legislation, social welfare
schemes and Keynesian economic policies. Underlying this
process is the belief that the changes can only be achieved
through the normal political decision-making process. Social
democratic societies have variable and vacillating mixtures of
public and private enterprise but where private capital is
dominant.
In a discussion between communists and social democrats it
may be difficult to differentiate between their ends; they both
want a transformed capitalist society. But they differ profoundly
over the question of means and these differences are elevated to a
matter of principle. Social democrats are committed to a gradual
transformation through electoral means and cannot countenance
the primary use of extra-parliamentary means. They reject out of
hand the very idea of change through revolution.
It is through this principled commitment to electoral gradualism
that the attitude of social democrats to the Soviet Union evolves.
They are hostile to communism in general for it has a threatening
status as an alternative option. In order to denounce communism
they search for defects in its practice and condemn the means
used to achieve it. Inevitably they concentrate their attention and
criticism on the world's primary illustration of a communist
society, namely the Soviet Union. They refuse to accept the
Soviet Union as a proper expression of socialist principles and are
thus obliged to denigrate it, to highlight its defects. They exploit
the same issues as other critics of the Soviet system, perhaps with
different emphases but with no less venom for as they adapt to
capitalism, they accommodate to its main values and see
communism as the main enemy. Social democrats in consequence
pursue domestic communists and find no difficulty in joining
capitalist alliances against communist countries. All social demo-
cratic parties, are anti-communist and, in the final analysis, anti-
Soviet.
There has been relatively little theoretical legitimation of
social democracy. In the USA there is no public discussion of
29
roads to socialism whereas in Britain it is dominated by the
mainstream Labour Party which is social democratic, pragmatic
in its approach to politics and reflects the economism of British
trade unions. The Labour Party, moreover, is not challenged
domestically by parties advocating alternative roads to socialism
so it is not compelled to justify itself in relation to the practice of
communism. Its anti-Sovietism is a latent factor which emerges
through its foreign policies supporting NATO, the 'special
relationship' with the USA and, when in office, through
continuing the essential parts of Conservative foreign policies.
This assessment is reflected neatly in The Future of Socialism by
CAR Crosland, written during the period of the Cold War.
Crosland's book is most probably the most important post-war
treatise on social democracy to be published in Britain. He
considered it unnecessary to devote any time to a discussion of
communism. He rejected Marxism as a body of analysis, in any
case. "In my view", he wrote, "Marx has little or nothing to offer
the contemporary socialist, either in respect of practical policy, or
of the correct analysis of our society, or even of the right
conceptual tools or framework. His problems have been almost
without exception falsified ... his teaching . . . holds little
relevance today . . ." Ll He went on to illustrate from the
experience of Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s that
capitalism had already been transformed through the process of
social democracy in that capitalists had lost their commanding
position to the state, the government was no longer the executive
of the capitalist class, nationalization had transferred power to
workers and that industry was largely managed by a non-capitalist
managerial class. These ideas sound somewhat archaic in contem-
porary Britain but they are still how social democrats would
explain the socialist transformation process. Crosland, moreover,
did not question whether a socialist Britain should remain in
NATO, under the tutelage of the USA. The implication of all his
references to international relations was that Britain's alignment
against the Soviet Union was correct. This has largely remained
the position of the Labour Party.
The experiences of social democratic parties in West Germany,
Scandinavia and the Netherlands confirm that of Britain. This is
not the case in France and Italy, however, where social
democrats have had to confront large communist parties and,
have, therefore, had to be more explicit about their own identity.
There is also a greater emphasis on comparative socialist theory
30
the continent of Europe than in Britain simply because
t^opean socialist movements have not been grounded * he
E Smtsrn of trade anions as in Britain. European socialist
Academics are called on. therefore, to play a greater part m
Stating the virtues of social democracy than m Britain.
^The second type of ideological division in socialist movements
Jes specifically out of anti-Sovietism and has been expressed
SSdi the rise of Trotskyist splinter groups and the break of
Sun^t China with the Soviet Union in 1967 when the
Se Communist Party argued that capitalism had been re-
established in the Soviet Union. This division put
of he radical left in capitalist countries in opposition to the Soviet
Umon Some had joined Trotskyist groups in small numbers > unrt
19% when the events in Hungary and the revelations about Stal n
It the CPSU 20th Congress in Moscow created dissension m
le^ern communist parties. After that the anti-Soviet groups
' in size and in number, for their propensity to sph*
continued. The Trotskyism, who were themselves conceptually
d vided designated the Soviet Union as a degenerate worker
state as Trotsky himself had done. Some of them described this
degenerancy as\tate capitalism' while others condemned both
the Soviet Union and China as bureaucratic.
The tudent unrest in the USA, France and West Germany m
the 1960s introduced many new recruits to the radical left who
ndmired the Chinese Revolution and followed the Chinese
aXis ot the Soviet Union. They joined the Maoist groups
which Relieved that the Bolshevik leaders had "erected an out-
and-out capitalist economic structure of a state monopoly ype
(which) conforms in all essential features to the classical analysts
of imperialism given by Lenin."'-
The Trotskyist and Maoist diversions attracted ew workers but
had a fascination for students at the undergraduate an Ipos -
graduate level as well as university teachers In consequence it
fumed some academic Marxists to anti-Sov.etism who were more
perceptive and more persuasive than the conv entio rial ! Sovieto-
logists and Kremlinologists who attacked the Soviet Union. Such
promment Marxist writers as Paul Sweezy, the editor of AtotfWy
Review and Charles Bettelheim who had wntten exten vely
about class in the Soviet Union as well as about the Cultma
revolution in China," took up the Chinese position . E rne
Mandel rewrote Marxist economic theory »f&*!*%™g^
Trotskyist interpretation of the Soviet Union while Isaac Deutscher
31
expressed his Trotskyist perception of the Soviet Union through
his nonetheless scholarly biographies of Leon Trotsky and Joseph
Stalin. There have, of course, been other intellectuals, especially
from the "New Left" which tends not to dirty its fingers in
practical politics, who have made their contributions to the
stereotype, usually around the question of 'human rights'. 14
The latest relevant ideological division within the Labour
Movement is that caused by the rise of Eurocommunism within
European Communist parties. As in the case of social democracy,
the Eurocommunist attitude towards the Soviet Union is a
consequence of the rejection of a class analysis of capitalism in
general. The Italian Communist Party, which has been at the
margin of electoral success for many of the post-war years,
started the process by postulating that the transition to socialism
had to be through existing capitalist institutions. It was followed
by a number of European communist parties, including that in
Britain. The main theoretical case for Eurocommunism was
articulated by Santiago Carrillo, then general secretary of the
Communist Party of Spain, in 1976 though he fairly quickly
deserted it. 15
The rejection of a consistent class analysis meant that the
political categories which flowed from it, such as the leading role
of the working class, the strategic importance of trade unions, the
need for a dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist basis of
the Soviet Union, were also rejected. Although the Euro-
communist approach to the Soviet Union was a consequence of
an analytical position rather than a cause, the Soviet model was a
specially important factor because Western European communist
parties began to see an identification with it as an obstacle to
electoral successes. This encouraged them to adopt a pragmatic
approach towards the Soviet Union. They did not regard the
Soviet Union with uniform suspicion and hostility as did social
democratic parties and in the main continued to have a
relationship with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They
joined with social democratic parties, however, on selected issued
such as the crisis in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the presence of
Soviet troops in Afghanistan, the legitimacy of Solidarity in
Poland and over the question of human rights in general. They
became involved in anti-Soviet alliances within the Peace
Movement. Thus in this way a new source of academic critics of
the Soviet Union was uncovered which effectively endorsed the
Western stereotype of that country. The occasional support of
32
Eurocommunists for Soviet policies was smothered by the
establishments' acclaim for their criticism. Up till the present,
however, Eurocommunist academics have not made a significant
intellectual contribution one way or the other to the debate over
the Soviet Union.
The Legitimizers of Capitalism
The reason why so few academics are willing to write
favourably about the Soviet Union does not reflect well on their
intellectual integrity. That is, it is not because the majority have
analysed the Soviet Union and have made their preference for the
Western way of life. Most academics either duck the issue or
make their preference known simply by projecting Western
institutions as ideal types, thus denigrating Soviet ones by
implication. In their work, for example, whether it is about
poverty, unemployment, crime or industrial unrest they locate
the causes in the malfunctioning of the system and not in the
structure of capitalism itself. In effect they are saying that there is
nothing inherently wrong with capitalism, that nothing would be
gained by changing it and, that, therefore, there is nothing to be
learned or gained from differently structured societies such as the
Soviet Union. Some go further than this and say that if only the
malfunctioning could be cured everything would be perfect.
These academics depict Western institutions as ideal types.
Private ownership, the free market, the secret ballot, parliamen-
tary democracy, the profit motive are all attributed with the
virtue of perfection so long as they are allowed to function
without interference, aggravation or modification. They state
that economic resources can only be effectively distributed
through the free market mechanism; that incentives to invest, to
work, to innovate can only arise from the profit motive; that
democracy can only exist where there are free elections with
competing candidates in multiple parties. It follows that a society
without a free market, with no profit motive and which is not
governed through a parliamentary system must suffer from major
economic and political defects which are expressed through
inferior economic performances and a denial of political rights.
Put differently, the inference is that private ownership is good in
itself and that public ownership is bad; that individualism is good
and that collectivism is bad; that the free market is good and that
state planning is bad. By all or any of these scores the Soviet
33
Union is malformed.
This form of anti-Sovietism is a corollary of the need for
capitalist societies to protect themselves with ideas which
convince their populations that they live in the best of all possible
worlds. Academics help fulfill this need with complex theories
which do not necessarily refer to the Soviet Union but which
analyze efficiency, freedom, democracy and equality solely in
terms of Western capitalist values. Some of the most influential
legitimizers of capitalism have, however, made direct references
to the Soviet system and its form of organization. The most
important contributors in this group are F A von Hayek and
Milton Friedman, the principal theorists of monetarism, and Karl
Popper, the most influential philosopher for capitalism in recent
history. Both Hayek and Popper began to make their impact in
the English speaking world with a frontal attack on marxism as a
method and communism as a practice while the Second World
War was in progress. They interacted with each other to provide
formidable intellectual reinforcements for capitalism at a time
when there was a widespread distrust of free market forces. Both
wrote major works attacking the basis of communism whilst the
Soviet Union was repelling the Nazi invaders. In fact, Hayek
attempted to show in his book, The Road to Serfdom, 1 *' that
communism was a totalitarian form of government which gave
rise to fascism. Thus while the Russians and Germans were
locked in bitter battle he tarred each with the same brush and
posed them both as evil options to liberal capitalism. In order to
do this he projected his own unique sequence of historical stages.
Socialist societies, he claimed, arose because of the failure of
political leaders to protect the conditions necessary for the
operation of the free market. In other words they arose because
free enterprise was not achieved rather than because of inherent
defects in it. He emphasized totalitarian trends in socialism and
compared them with fascism. To make this sequence credible
Hayek defined the Weimar Republic as socialist, claimed that
many of its leaders inevitably became fascists and that Nazism
was a form, an outcrop of socialism. His arguments formed an
intellectually devious case for free private enterprise but they
were the soil in which the anti-state monetarist views of Milton
Friedman were cultivated. Karl Popper, who was Professor of
Logic and Scientific Method at the University of London,
provided the philosophical arguments for Hayek and those
economists, sociologists, political scientists and historians who
34
supported the capitalist status quo. His book The Open Society
and lis Enemies published in two volumes in 1945, was acclaimed
by the classical economists of the time for its purported expose of
marxism. His work has continued to give encouragement to those
academic social scientists who are busily legitimizing the capitalist
system.
The Cost of Dissent
Just as societies encourage and facilitate ideas which support
them so they disapprove of those which question their legitimacy.
The effect is to reward academics whose work endorses capitalism
and to penalize those whose work undermines it. The penalties
vary but they can be severe. It would be misleading to show
intellectual activity responding solely to rewards and penalties
but there is undoubtedly some relationship. There are stereo-
types about professions as well as about societies. That which
portrays the academic profession shows it to be motivated by a
search for truth above all else, and concerned with learning,
developing and communicating knowledge. This image helps to
protect a working environment in which free intellectual activity
can take place. There are impediments in the environment,
however, which are not easily recognized as such. Academics
themselves are products of an intellectual milieu in which
capitalist values predominate; they are as responsive as other
persons to the pressures for conformity; they are involved in
professional intellectual activity as a means of subsistence and are
as concerned as managers or civil servants with their security of
employment, promotion, status and rewards. In the same way, as
with all other employees, the product of academic activity is not
the object of that activity which is to subsist. 17 If ideological
conformity produces stable and secure employment and intellectual
enthusiasm for capitalist values results in promotion, and if
promotion brings high status and material benefits then all of
these factors will enter into the perception by academics of the
character and purpose of their work. Moreover, in case there is a
tendency to feel that the single-minded pursuit of subsistence is
contrary to the single-minded pursuit of truth, then capitalist
ethics equate high status and income with high quality intellectual
activity. Those who make it in the profession need have no
qualm's about what they have done to get there.
So academics can conform to capitalist values in the righteous
35
belief that they are adhering to the highest intellectual values.
But just in case they have douhts and might even be considering
dissent, they learn that there are costs for non-compliance.
The costs of expressing dissenting views are often difficult to
assess because, in many instances, they are hard to discern. But
everyone in academic life knows they are present. They have
always existed, as a survey of the history of science or of ideas in
general would show. Tn academic circles, of course, dissent is not
necessarily a political act. It refers to any disagreement with
prevailing theories and can be as vituperous in the subjects of
English Literature and Philosophy as in Economics or Politics as
shown by the long saga surrounding Dr Leavis in the English
Department of the University of Cambridge and the hostility
shown by Oxford Philosophers to their critics in the post-war
period. Life may be just as difficult for a dissenting specialist in
mediaeval comedy as for one in contemporary social science.
Politically dissenting academics, however, confront not simply
the hostility of an irascible professor backed by a university
administration but the multifarious power of the state, exercised
by the government and its security services, the press, television,
publishers, editors of journals and their conforming peers. In this
situation the costs of dissent are wide-ranging. Applicants for
academic posts in the USA and Britain who have known
dissenting views find it difficult to get them though rarely is the
real reason for rejection exposed. Such candidates are usually
told that they are under-qualified, over-qualified or wrongly-
qualified. Where academics are employed on short-term contracts
or where there is a tenure system as in the USA where all new
entrants to university posts are compelled to seek tenure of
employment after six years and in that period are judged by the
scale of their published work, it is difficult for dissenters to
survive.
There has been no serious study of the actual costs of political
dissent in British universities as there has been in the USA. This
may be because of the pretence that such things do not happen in
Britain. But in a study which raises the issue in the field of adult
education in the Cold War period it is quite clear that academics
who disagreed with the Cold War hysteria were excluded from
jobs, refused access to particular courses, put under scrutiny and,
in isolated Cases, dismissed. 18 Moreover, it is known that many
activists in the student protest movement in the late 1960s,
although academically highly qualified, failed to obtain university
36
posts. This exclusion occurred even though at the time dissent
was more permissible in part because the student revolt had made
dissenting books commercially profitable.
The British government's concern about dissent has never been
absent but it has vacillated in its intensity with the course of
international relations. It was acute in the Cold War period;
seemingly declined during the period of detente and re-emerged
in the late 1970s with the frenetic growth of the Peace Movement.
The state's attention was then focussed on the Soviet Union as
the enemy. Anyone who questioned that perception was singled
out for special attention.
The Repression of Academic Dissent in the US
The Cold War period spanned the administrations of Truman,
Eisenhower and Kennedy, from 1946 until after the Cuba crisis.
It was a conflict over communism in the USA and abroad,
marked by red-baiting and witch-hunts at home and threats to
depose socialist governments in Europe and the Soviet Union. Its
essence was described succinctly at the time by Paul A Baran, an
economics professor at Stanford University who himself became
a victim of the red-baiting, in the following way:
"The Cold War is . . . by no means irrational from the
point of view of the American ruling classes. Every-
thing synthesizes beautifully in its general effects. It
provides the political climate in which an agreement
can be extracted from the American people to spend
$20 billion annually for military purposes. It sets the
stage for the complete destruction of an independent
labor movement ... It has reshuffled domestic political
forces in such a way that openly fascist organizations
and individuals, only a few years ago hiding in the
underworld of American politics, are able to operate at
the center of the political stage— witness the current
McCarthy affair. And, last but not least, it provides the
grand strategy for expanding and protecting American
investment abroad ... In one word: it furnishes the
political formula for the concerted struggle for (the)
preservation of capitalism abroad and for its strengthen-
ing and, if necessary, fascization at home." 19
Internal repression was orchestrated by the US Congress
37
House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Senate Internal
Security Sub-Committee and the Senate Permanent Sub-
Committee on Investigations. This last Committee was chaired by
Senator Joseph McCarthy who made the headlines through his
assault on liberal opinion-formers in the US and in US agencies
abroad. But, as Paul Baran indicated, political repression was an
integral part of the period, interacting with the increase in
armaments expenditure. There was already a barrage of anti-
communist legislation on the American statute book. The Smith
Act of 1940, introduced as a federal sedition act and intended for
removing opposition to American involvement in the war against
Germany, was used to ensnare communists who hitherto had
been protected by the Constitution. In October, 1949, 12 of the
13 members of the national board of the Communist Party of the
US were imprisoned under the Act for no less than 5 years. There
was a clause in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 which prohibited
communists from holding office in trade unions. The Internal
Security Act of 1950 (the McCarron Act) established concentra-
tion camps for dissenters though they were never used. President
Truman was active in filling up the loopholes through which
dissent could be expressed. After the Congressional elections in
1946 in which the Republicans made substantial gains a loyalty
programme became a shuttlecock between the parties and, in
order to outdo the Republicans "Truman signed Executive Order
9835 which launched a purge on the federal civil service and
inspired initiative purges at everv level of American working
life". 20
Academics were a natural target for the red-baiters and a purge
began of what David Caute called the "reducators". The
universities in many cases were willing participants thus exploding
the self-generated myth of the university as a "free market-place
of ideas". The President of the University of Washington
defended the firing of six professors from the University for being
members of the Communist Party on the grounds that "the
characteristics of the Party were inimical to the future welfare of
the institutions of freedom in the United States." 22 Numerous
universities including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and New York University, dismissed professors for
communist affiliations or simply for refusing to reveal the names
and activities of others. They were assisted by a formidable array
of informers from the faculties. Secret FBI papers stolen by a
radical group from Media University in Pennsylvania in 1971
38
revealed that campus police worked hand in hand with the FBI
and that administrative and faculty personnel were high on the
list of informants whom secret agents contacted regularly. 23
Sidney Hook, Professor of Philosophy at New York University,
internationally known as a scholar of marxism, not only gained a
reputation as an exposer of communist indoctrination techniques
and the dangers of "Soviet fifth column" activities but established
himself as a practitioner of red-baiting by informing against the
celebrated specialist on China, Owen Lattimore, and Harry
Slochower, a professor of German at Brooklyn College. 24 The
details of Paul Baran's life at Stanford University add to the
picture of academic establishments deserting academic freedom
like the plague at the first whiff of a crisis. Baran was the only
marxist economist with tenure at a leading American university
during the Cold War. His death of a heart attack in 1964 was
"hastened" it was alleged, "by the brutality of the University's
hounding". 25 In a letter to Paul Sweezy in 1964 he wrote that if it
were not for his small son "I would literally quit tomorrow . . .
rather . . , than have to tolerate those bastards spitting in my face
all the time." 26 When Stanford's confidential file on Baran was
leaked to the press in 1971 it contained many letters and memos
"from alumni insisting that the Administration . . . take action
against Baran for treason and subversive statements . . ."
The effect of the red-baiting was two-fold. The first was that
many academics lost their jobs. David Caute has described the
extent:
"The political purges that hit American colleges and
schools during the Truman -Eisenhower era cost at
least six hundred and probably more, teachers and
professors their jobs, about 380 of them in New York
City. The scale of the intimidation was partly reflected
in a survey conducted in 1955 of 2451 social science
teachers, in 165 colleges and universities, who reported
386 incidents involving allegations of Communism,
subversion or fellow-travelling, 10 per cent of which
resulted in dismissal or forced resignation." 28
By June, 1953 more than a half of over 100 professors who
refused to reveal names under the protection of the Fifth
Amendment had been dismissed or suspended. The University of
California alone, had lost 110 scholars by March 1951-26
dismissed, 37 resignations in protest and 47 who had refused
39
appointments. In one bitter year 55 regular courses had to be
dropped.
The second effect was incalculable. This was the extent of the
suppression of views critical of the USA and supportive of the
Soviet Union. American liberalism of the New Deal era was
shattered by the Cold War and a new creed, Cold War liberalism
emerged "head and shoulders above its competitors to the Left
and to the Right as the dominant ideology within government,
the press and the world of learning. The linchpin of this creed was
hostility toward the Soviet Union and American Com-
munism . . ." Z9 The Cold War liberals had an obsessive anti-
Sovietism which blinded them to the excesses of those to their
Right, like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, who were
pressing for domestic purges but who shared their hostility to the
Soviet Union. A consequence was not simply that academics
became careful about what they said about the Soviet Union but
that they tried to avoid the topic altogether. A study of the impact
of the Cold War on social science teaching reported that "some
teachers omitted certain topics which they believed, on professional
grounds, ought to be discussed. Other respondants slanted their
presentation away from their professional convictions, or
balanced an intellectually preferred but controversial position
with discussion of a more popular opposing viewpoint. All three
ended up by giving students an altered version of what in their
best judgement was the truth . . " 30 It is hardly surprising, the
Report added, that specific omissions occurred in connection
with the study of communism, Soviet Russia and Red China and
that where people had already published controversial views they
engaged in toning them down or rewriting them altogether.
The repression of intellectuals in the USA during the Cold War
period was unique only in its intensity. It arose again in the late
1960s following in the wake of the student protest movement and
involved dismissals, censorship and police surveillance. 31 And it
has re-emerged since the intensification of the arms race in the
late 1970s. The features of the present international situation
closely resemble those of the immediate post-war Cold War
period. As Paul Baran commented on the First Cold War,
everything synthesizes beautifully for the American ruling classes,
particularly the domestic political forces where political authorita-
rianism and economic liberalism combine to create a consensus in
favour of arms production. But there is a difference. Cold War
liberalism has maintained an unbroken dominance over govern-
40
ment, the media and the institutions of higher learning. The
academics do not have to break with progressive habits as was the
case with the New Deal liberals. They still have the memory of
repression but have lost the habit of genuine ideological protest.
Some joined together to protest at the Vietnam War, at US
involvement in Nicaragua and at the US nuclear arms build-up,
but there has not been any ideological basis to the protests. None
of it has involved questioning the legitimacy of capitalism. There
is no compulsion on academics to rethink their commitment to
the American way of life. Even those who protest have a rhetoric
which presents the American people with no options. The effect
is that the methods of intellectual repression which were used
under Truman and Eisenhower are no longer necessary. The
academic milieu is dominated by a frightening consensus which
has only shades of distinctions. It is the faithful servant, a
compliant tool, of the capitalist system. The situation is different
in Britain and more encouraging but until the contradictions in
the USA have their own powerful ideological expressions British
questioning of the stereotype of the Soviet Union will have little
impact on international relations.
FOOTNOTES
1 . The New York Times, Monday 18th November. 1985 .
2. ibid.
3. This comment is based on my own recent experience involving research
into Soviet trade unions, in the course of which T have consulted most
British and American works dealing with the history of labour in general
and trade unions in particular in the Soviet Union. Some contain usable
information from which negative and derogatory conclusions are drawn:
others arc completely unusable. In the first category tor example, is The
Origin of Forced Labour in (he Soviet State, 1917- 1 921. Documents and
Material, by James Bun van, California, 1967. This is an invaluable
collection of documents about the problems of labour in revolution and
civil war from which many lessons could have been drawn by capitalist
nations in World War It. In the second category is The Life and Death of
Soviet Trade Unionism, 1917-S928 by Jay B Sorenson, New York, 1969.
Sorenson, a faculty member of Smith College, Massachusetts drew on
many original Soviet sources to create a sick fantasy which has no utility of
any kind, There are many such works dealing with the history of the
Communist Party in the 1930s, the life of Stalin and Soviet foreign policy.
It would be tedious to repeat them .
4. Sec The Russian Revolution of 1905. The Workers' Movement and the
Formation of Bolshevism and Menshevism by Solomon M Schwarz,
University of Chicago Press, 1967. This hook rewrites the history of the
1905 Revolution to favour the Mcnshcviks.
41
5. Is the Red Flag Flying. The political economy of the Soviet Union today,
London, 1979, pp, 236 and Human Rights in the Soviet Union. Including
Comparison with the USA London, 198^, pp, 338.
6. Soviet Economic Development Since 1917, 1948, pp. 474.
7. A History of the USSR, Pelican Books, 1950, pp. 384 and Man and Plan in
the Soviet Economy, London, 1948, pp. 300.
8. Sidney and Beatrice Webb were authors of Soviet Communism. A New
Civilization?, a lengthy and detailed study of the USSR in 1935.
9. Carr wrote prolific-ally from the 1930s until his death at the age of ninety in
1982. He was not a marxist but his 14 volume History of Soviet Russia is a
classic, as is The Soviet Impact on the Western World, 1946, a brief,
persuasive analysis of Soviet morality and institutions.
10. Robert Davies wrote 2 volumes in "The Industrialization of Soviet Russia"
series which were. The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930,
1980, pp. 491 and The Soviet Collective Farm 1929-1930, 1980, pp. 216.
David Lane wrote a number of books including The Soviet Industrial
Worker, (with Felicity O'Delf), 1978, pp. 167, while Mary McAuley is the
author of Politics and the Soviet Union, .977, pp. 352.
1 1 . The Future of Socialism by C A R Crosland, London , 1 956, pp. 20-21 ,
12. The Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR by Martin Nicholas, Chicago,
1975, quoted by Szymanski in Is the Red Flag Flying? op cit, p. 5.
13. Class Struggles in the USSR, 2 volumes, 1976 and 1978. Sweezy and
Bettetheim jointly wrote On the Transition to Socialism, New York, 1971,
while Sweezy expressed his own thoughts about the Soviet Union in Post-
Revolutionary Society, New York, 1980.
14. 1 have concerned myself here only with English speaking academies. All
capitalist countries have experienced a similar academic legitimation of
anti-Sovietism to that in Britain and the USA. There has been a plethora
of academics in West Germany, France and Italy in all of the categories
named here who have served the stereotype. There have also been some
who have suffered for their non-conformity. West German academics
suffered most for under the Bcrufsverbot decree introduced by Chancellor
Willie Brandt's Social Democratic government in 1972, political dissent
cost some of them their jobs. The decree was introduced allegedly to keep
enemies of the West German Constitution out of civil service jobs. It was,
however, used largely to get Communists and their allies dismissed from
government employment. In West Germany university teachers are
employees of the state. It covered a rather loose definition of acts
considered detrimental to the Constitution but at its core was expressed
sympathy with the Soviet Union. The decree's net was cast very wide,
bringing in people who were neither communists nor marxists and who
were simply protesting about specific issues such as women's rights.
15. 'Eurocommunism" and the State by Santiago Carrillo, London, 1977.
16. The Road to Serfdom by F A Hayek, London, 1944.
17. See Wage Labour and Capital, by Karl Marx, p. 34.
1 8- Adult Education and the Cold War by Roger T Fieldhouse, Leeds, 1 985.
19. The Longer View, by Paul A Baran, 1969, p. 206. This quotation was
written in July 1950,
20. The Great Fear by David Caute, p, 27.
21. ibid, p. 403.
42
22. "Professionalism in the Social Sciences; Institutionalized Repression" by
Marlene Dixon, in Sociological Inquiry, 1977, Vol 46, No 3-4. This article
is a penetrating exposure of restrictions on academic freedom in the USA.
23. Caute, op cit, p. 428.
24. ibid, pages 31 9 and 444.
25 . Marlene Dixon , op cit. p. 8-25 .
26. ibid.
27. ibid, p. 8-20.
28. Caute. op cit. p. 406.
29. ibid. p. 51.
30. The Academic Mind, bv Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens, Jr. 1958. p.
197.
31 . See Human Rights in the Soviet Union by Albert Szymanski. pp. 187-195.
43
PART II
Soviet Reality
Chapter Four
The Democratic Criteria 1
Diversity
The reason for examining the reality of the Soviet Union is not
simply to measure the extent to which the Western portrayal of it
is a distortion but to try to understand why it is portrayed in such
degrading terms. Tt is obviously not sufficient to establish that the
Soviet Union is socially and culturally different from the Western
nations. Differences between nations are commonplace. There
are wide climatic, geographical, cultural and historical distinctions
between Britain, Japan, the USA and West Germany yet they
arouse no serious political interest nor do they currently form the
basis for enmity between them. What then is so offensive about
the Soviet Union?
There arc two main difficulties in answering this question. The
first is that the Soviet Union is so large and complex that it defies
generalizations. Behind and in spite of the Western image, 265.5
million people interact with each other in kinship, neighbourhood
and ethnic relations. They comprise 126 nationalities and ethnic
groups and speak more than 100 different languages. Many of
these people present greater contrasts than those which exist
between the Western nations themselves. Neither Czarist Russia
nor the Soviet Union has been a 'melting pot 1 for cultures, for
national identities have always been jealously guarded throughout
their histories. Russia was never a predator of the classic im-
perialist kind. Since the establishment of the Soviet Union the
variety of languages and cultures has been preserved and
developed so that in some ways there is greater diversity now
than ever before. It combines the Ukranians, conscious of their
heritage as the fountain of Russian culture; the Lithuanians
proud of their role in European history and of the beauty of their
47
language; the Innuits within the Arctic Circle who live scmi-
nomadic lives similar to the inhabitants of Greenland and
Labrador, well inside the permafrost zone, and the inhabitants of
Central Asia in the former colonies of Czarist Russia.
An indication of the complexity of the USSR can be gauged
from the exceptional cultural and regional diversity of the 45.5
million Islamic peoples who live there. Soviet Muslims are found
on the border of Poland, in Siberia, on the Chinese frontier, in
Central Asia and in Transcaucasia. They have varied ethnic
origins. There are the Turkic peoples such as the Tatars,
Azerbaidzhanis, Uzbeks and Uighurs; the Iranians such as the
Tadzhik, Ossetians, Kurds and Baluchis; the Caucasians, such as
the Avars, Lezghis and Tabasarans; and a number of other
groups such as the Arabs, the Armenian Khcmshils, the Chinese
Dunans, the Central Asian Gypsies and the Mongol Sart
Kalmyks. The linguistic heritage of the Soviet Muslims includes
15 Turkic, 10 Iranian and thirty Caucasian languages as well as
Chinese and Mongol. Their histories are equally varied. The
Tadzhiks belong to an ancient urban tradition while the Kazakhs
were nomadic until relatively recently; the Tatars arrived at the
Volga in the Thirteenth Century while the Dungans entered
Russian territory as refugees only a century ago; the Caucasians
on the other hand, are descendants of the original aboriginal
population. At the time of the Revolution the Azerbaidzhanis in
the region of Baku were industrialized, the Volga Tatars were
involved in commerce, the Turkmen were still plundering their
neighbours and the Karakalpaks were primitive herders and
farmers. This multiplicity of interests has produced contemporary
diversity. In all areas of the Soviet Union, much of the education
of Slav and Muslim is through the medium of their national
languages. They maintain their own traditions and extol their
own distinctive histories as well as their respective contributions
to the general welfare of Soviet society.
The Soviet people live in an area of almost incomprehensible
dimensions. They are distributed between continents. 71 per cent
of them live in Europe yet 75 per cent of Soviet territory lies in
Asia. The country covers 11 time zones ranging from Nachodka
on the Korean border, facing Japan, to Minsk, the capital of
Byelorussia, the most westerly Soviet Republic. The Soviet
Union comprises one-sixth of the world's surface, an area four-
teen times the combined size of Italy, France, Spain and Great
Britain. Just one town in Western Siberia, Novosibirsk, with 1.3
48
million inhabitants, has an administrative area almost five times
the size of Belgium. In many parts of the Soviet Union towns are
like oases located in vast forests or steppes. Air travel in recent
years has improved communications between the different parts
of the country but for most of its history the railways were the
only reliable means of transport involving long journeys between
the regions. Most Soviet people have lived out their lives in
relatively insulated communities in response to their own
particular material conditions and histories but within a broad
common political framework.
The diversity created by distance and relative isolation under-
scores that arising from geographical distinctions which range
from animal trapping for furs in the north to cotton growing in the
south. Many regions reflect the influences of different civiliza-
tions. Through invasions, in particular the Tatar one in the
Thirteenth Century, and travellers the cultures of the Orient have
mingled with those of Old Europe though in different degrees
and intensities. The consequences can be seen in art, music,
language, dress and dance.
None of this variety in Soviet life is present in the stereotype
which in so far as it recognizes people presents them as drab
Lowry-like figures, burdened by oppression and equality, waiting
to be rescued from their communist jailors by the freedonvloving
peoples of the West.
Distortion
The second difficulty encountered in answering what in Soviet
reality is offensive to the West is that the Soviet Union has been
subjected to such sustained and exaggerated distortion that all
aspects of Soviet life are perceived in a derogatory manner.
Objective qualities have no meaning except through perception.
Whatever the Soviet Union is or does is seen through the images
which have entered the consciousness of people in the West. This
is the most difficult problem for anyone intent on challenging the
veracity of the stereotype. An enemy cannot be believed.
Whatever it does must be for a sinister ulterior motive. Whatever
is positive in its achievements must have negative implications,
All the evidence presented in favour of the Soviet Union can be
transformed instantaneously through perception into a case
against it.
It follows that the imagery created in the West cannot be
50
disproved by empirical investigations. All empirical data is
subjected to perception and has no meaning apart from it. There
is no point then, in starting with evidence about the living
standards of Soviet workers, listing wage levels, price levels, the
availability of consumer goods, the social wage and trade union
benefits. Nor does it help simply to describe the legal rights of
workers or their involvement in the political decision-making
process. Not all data, of course, can be equally misconstrued.
There is some information, for example, relating to the position
of women in society, which cannot be so readily distorted.
Nonetheless the assessment of all Soviet data has to commence
with an analysis of the assumptions underlying Western perceptions.
Only after that has been done can it be possible to question the
meanings attributed to it.
Democracy
The Western view of Soviet society is based in the first instance
on the premise that it is not democratic. Western political
institutions, the multiparty system, contending candidates in
elections, the periodic secret ballots and parliamentary or
presidential government are seen as the essence of democracy.
There is little in the Soviet system to resemble these elements. It
does not govern itself according to the rules of the West. In the
first place the Soviet Union condemns itself with its own words
for it describes itself as a dictatorship of the proletariat. A
dictatorship is regarded as the antithesis of democracy and
historically has been associated with oppressive regimes in Fascist
Italy, Nazi Germany, in Spain under Franco and Portugal under
Salazar. Secondly, it has rejected multi-party politics and has
enshrined the power and status of the Communist Party in the
USSR Constitution. Thus the Soviet Union is governed by a party
which cannot be voted out. This is presumed to have two
consequences. Firstly, that a political party without competitors
tends to become bureaucratic and authoritarian, succumbing to
the 'iron law of oligarchy". This particular oligarchy, moreover is
perceived as a self-confessed dictatorship led by a succession of
First Secretaries which all in varying degrees have been attributed
with dictatorial powers though not all satisfying the classic role of
dictators. The second consequence is that the controlling func-
tionaries in a party which cannot be removed from power are
presumed to be protected from public exposures and accountability
51
and are free, therefore, to abuse their power in a corrupt fashion.
In order to maintain a power position which is not accorded them
by the free will of the people they have to resort to the use of state
force, secret police and the organs of propaganda. The Soviet
people are said in this situation to be oppressed, cowed and
muted, waiting for freedom. As this is assumed anyway every-
thing falls into place, thus completing the self-fulfilling prophesies
of Winston Churchill that communism ' l rots the soul of the
nation" and of F A von Hayek, that under communism the worst
gets to the top. 3
The manner in which Soviet politics is conducted has aided the
Western image-builders. In the Soviet Union there is a recognized
mechanism for political decision-making which is not constantly
in the public eye as in the Western parliamentary democracies. It
is not a point-scoring system, featuring public debate, influencing
and responding to public opinion polls, enticed by a media
searching for political sensations which, in dull periods creates its
own, Major political decisions in the Soviet Union are made away
from the public glare. People in general learn about them through
communiques from the Political Bureau of the CPSU or from
reports of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Soviet politics arc
not sensationalized through public clashes of personalities
appealing to wider audiences and hoping to improve their poll
ratings. There is, of course, gossip about personalities but it is not
institutionalized as the substance of politics as it is in the West.
The media has no part in the spread of Soviet gossip which
circulates in spite of it.
The Soviet political system, then, lends itself to accusations
that it is secretive and manipulative, that it is run by oligarchies in
their own interests. Such assertions arc rc-inforccd by Western
media representatives in Moscow who, trying to meet their own
standards of what is newsworthy, look for information about per-
sonalities and are forced to resort to gossip and 'informed' guess-
work, thus emphasizing the secretive character of the Soviet system.
This situation has been altered somewhat since Mr Gorbachev
became the First Secretary of the CPSU in that he has used the
media, particularly television, as a means of countering Western
perceptions of the Soviet Union and he has reduced the scope for
distortion. Bui all news from the Soviet Union, even visual
information on television no matter how well presented, is still
sifted through a perception which defines that country as un-
democratic. The assumption underlying this perception, namely
52
that only Western political institutions can be described as
democratic, can be questioned on a number of" counts.
Dissent in the West
The values which are considered to be so essential in the West
for a democratic process, namely the protection of the rights ot
individuals in relation to the state and of dissenting minorities
have resulted from the particular historical experiences of Britain
and the USA and are not equally commonly held va lues in all
Western capitalist countries. The countries in the West have
evolved their political decision-making processes broadly along
two tvpes of historical routes.
The English speaking route came via the Renaissance, the
Reformation, and the English Revolution. Along it the character-
istic of individualism was acquired from the way in which British
capitalism developed through individual traders and producers
disentangling themselves from state commercial regulations, thus
contrasting the rights of the individual with those of the state. I he
protection of the economic rights of individuals to acquire and
accumulate capital and to dispense with it without hindrance from
the state, became the focus of English and Scottish philosophy m
the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. John Locke took up
the question of individualism after the Civil War by posing the
fights of individuals against the state and church but it was not
articulated as economic doctrine until more than a century later
when Adam Smith wrote about natural economic laws in the
theory of laissez-faire. Smith was followed by David R.cardo and
between them they laid the basis for a theory which postulated
that each person was the best judge of his or her own interests
and who by pursuing those interests helped to maximize the
utility of evervone. The best way of making people happy was
therefore, to 'reduce the restrictions on individual effort and
initiative. This involved reducing government legislation totne
minimum consistent with preserving individual freedom. Thus
economic individualism, which reflected the aspirations of a
nascent bourgeoisie in the Eighteenth Century, became the core
of the ideology of the dominant class in the Nineteenth Century.
And although it had a political purpose it eschewed making
political comments bv implying that there was no relationship
between economic and political rights. It effectively, and success-
fully separated economics and politics as distinct, unrelated
53
subjects. The economic power of an owner of property was
presumed to have no bearing on that person's political rights.
This became the dominant feature of liberal political thought.
Along this English route political rights were achieved and
extended through a series of confrontations ranging from
revolution to political demonstrations between the state and dis-
senting groups seeking the right to dissent. The basic confrontation
which gave character to the English political system was the
Seventeenth Century Revolution. On that occasion the issue was
religious dissent but because of the unity between church and
state the results were profoundly political. The Revolution ended
in a compromise between Anglicanism which was the state
religion and the nonconformists but it endorsed the views of those
who preached tolerance for religious dissent. After that time the
right to dissent became established as nonconformist religious
groups split and multiplied. At the same time groups of workers
in the skilled trades struggled for the right to organize and to
oppose both employers and the state. Throughout the Eighteenth
Century trade unions were formed in a variety of trades in an
uncoordinated ad hoc fashion with each group seeking its own
right to dissent. The struggles became overtly political in the
Nineteenth Century with the middle class in 1832 and the working
class in 1867 obtaining the right to vote. Tt remained a patchwork,
however, for coal miners, agricultural workers and women had to
conduct their own struggles; women did not achieve limited
political emancipation until 1918. Tt was in this peculiarly British
way that the right to dissent from the state without institutional
discrimination became synonymous with the democratic process.
It enshrined compromise as the essence of political action.
The alternative route to contemporary Western democracy
stemmed from the French revolution which, unlike the English
one, did not diversify power but simply transferred it from one
nominal ruler, 'the crown', to another, 'the people' without
altering the autocratic character in which it was exercised. "The
history of the revolution in France" E H Carr commented,
"promoted the trend towards totalitarian democracy . . . (it) . . .
did not issue in a balance or compromise: it was a victory not for
political tolerance, or for the rights of the individual as against the
state, but for a particular view of the authority of the state." 3 The
French democratic system has retained its authoritarian character
and, in consequence, its lack of concern for dissenting minorities.
This characteristic is displayed, for example, in trade unions
54
where different ideological interests have been incapable of
associating within a single organization. In France there are three
national centres representing Communist, non-Communist
Socialist and Christian views.
Authoritarian, as against liberal, democracy is present in the
many European countries which were influenced by the French
during the Nineteenth Century. There the concerns about
minorities have been over-ridden by the need for a strong,
cohesive state which, in the manner suggested by Rousseau in the
Social Contract in 1762, expressed the 'general will' of the society.
Thus civil liberties have always been secondary to populist
government thereby facilitating the transition from authoritarian
to totalitarian government.
The USA had its own historical qualities which though visibly
different from those in England had sufficient structural similarities
to identify with the English democratic values. American society
in the Nineteenth Century was forged from waves of immigrants
escaping from various forms of authoritarianism. In the new
society individualism was a precondition for economic survival
whereas, due to the accumulation of immigrants from different
cultures and religions, tolerance of dissent became a necessary
condition for communal survival. By making virtue out of
necessity, individualism and the right to dissent have emerged as
essentia] but unrelated democratic values in the USA and are
pursued with greater intent than in any other Western nation.
Democracy clearly is a many-varied thing even amongst the
Western capitalist countries.
Russia before 1917 had none of the societal qualities of
England and the USA except that it was an emerging capitalist
nation. Industrialization was nurtured by state intervention such
as tariffs, subsidies and state orders rather than through market
competition and took the form of large-scale, centralized produc-
tion units. Thus economic growth in Czarist Russia had nothing
to do with economic individualism. It was accompanied, more-
over, by an oppressive, centralized state apparatus in which the
secret police, arbitrary arrests and exile were common features.
The notion of individual freedom had no part in Russian conditions.
Liberal political thought, in consequence, had no relevance, right
up to the Bolshevik Revolution. In so far as Russia developed
democratic forms they were a version of French authoritarian
democracy. No liberal traditions were on hand to influence the
founders of the new Soviet state in 1917.
55
Tolerance and Intolerance of Dissent
The qualities which the Western democracies emphasize most
when assessing the Soviet Union are tolerance of dissent and the
freedom to escape from intolerable conditions by emigrating. No
freedoms, however, are absolute in any country. Indeed there is a
perpetual argument in most societies about the limits on dissent.
Governments need to know the nature and extent of protest
which is consistent with what they regard as the preservation of
their societies. They continually scrutinize groups, movements,
parties and individuals for their threats to the system. The
definition of what constitutes a threat varies with circumstances.
For example, when a country is under an external threat through
war then restrictions on internal protests are intensified. This was
the experience of Britain and the USA during both World Wars
when those who were defined as potential sympathizers of the
enemy because of their ethnicity or even because of the ethnic
origins of their names were put under surveillance, socially
harassed or interned. At the outbreak of the First World War for
instance, The Daily Mail distributed posters urging the formation
of Vigilance Committees "with the duty of examining the houses,
gardens, outhouses etc, of all Germans and Austrians ... It is
better that every German, naturalized or not, in this country shall
be safely put under lock and key than that one British soldier
should die through the treachery of the enemy in our midst." In
the Second World War German aliens in Britain were put into
concentration camps irrespective of their loyalties. 6 The Japanese
Americans who lived West of the Mississippi also suffered for,
after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, they were forcibly relocated
to camps in barren areas of the West and prevented from
practising Japanese culture or language.
War, however, is simply an extreme example of a general
sensitivity about dissent. Whenever the ruling class in Western
societies has felt threatened it has reacted by imposing restric-
tions on those opposed to it. The facility to dissent, therefore, is a
sort of barometer of the confidence of the ruling class. Since 1917
international communism has been perceived as the main threat
to the stabililty of capitalism and on occasions, as in the USA
after the two World Wars, it has been the justification for wide-
spread repression. Domestic communists, regarded as the agents
of international communism, have been the victims. But whatever
the circumstances they have always been under some sort of
56
surveillance by the state. This pre-occupation with communists,
however, is a symptom of a much more general, pervasive and
underlying intolerance in Western democratic societies, namely
an inability to recognize and accept unregulated collective
dissent.
In Western democratic societies legitimate dissent is that which
conforms to the value of individualism and is, therefore, confined
to individual protest. This is institutionalized in the electoral
system based on the secret individual ballot vote. From the point
of view of the ruling class this is a sensible recognition of protest
because the greater the fragmentation the less it can endanger
their power base. It results in pitting individuals against the
institutions of capitalism, Parliament, the courts, the agents of
government, multi-national companies and the like. There is no
threat in such a grossly unequal struggle.
Dangers to the system only arise when individuals recognize
their weakness and combine into collectives to rectify the power
imbalance. It is for this reason that collective protest has never
been fully legitimized in Western democracies, as the history of
trade unionism in Britain and the USA testifies. US governments
have consistently engaged in hostilities with trade unions, except
for a brief interlude during the New Deal period, legislating to
control them, taking administrative action to weaken them,
siding invariably with employers and whenever necessary using
state violence to suppress them. Trade unions have had similar
experiences in all other capitalist societies. The state vendetta
against trade unions in Britain has in general been less oppressive
than in the USA mainly because British employers have at times
attempted to control unions more by assimilation than confronta-
tion. The rights of collective action in Britain, however, have
always been fragile, likely to be whittled away or even demolished
whenever the opportunity to do so has arisen. This fact has been
illustrated by recent history. British trade unions after almost two
centuries of struggle for the right to take collective action, and
during which time it could have been presumed that they had
established certain basic rights, have become weaker and more
constrained by the law than at any time since before 1875. The
intensity of the state's unease with collective protests was revealed
firstly when unprecedented state force in both scale and intensity
was used against the miners during their 1984-8 strike and then
against the London printers in their dispute with News International
in 1986-7.
57
The evidence about dissent clearly shows that its practice varies
with circumstances within and between Western democratic
societies irrespective of how strongly a belief in dissent is
pronounced. There are of course marked differences between
such societies for some, for historical and contemporary economic
reasons, have wider margins of tolerance than others. In all
situations, however, because of the imperative need of societies to
sustain themselves, dissent is a phenomenon which can be afforded
so long as it is not too dangerous.
The Question of Emigration
The ability of people to move freely within and between
countries is similarly determined by material conditions rather
than by an inherent belief in it as a right. The Western countries
condemn the Soviet Union as a closed society because it restricts
the right of its citizens to leave the country. For them emigration
is described as an inalienable, incontrovertible right and campaigns
are mounted to obtain exit visas for those Soviet citizens who are
refused them. The elevation of emigration as a measure of
democracy, however, is historically fortuitous in that it meets the
needs of Western democracies at this moment.
States have always imposed restrictions on the movement of
people between their borders in accordance with their assessment
of the national interest. 7 There have been occasions where
immigration has been encouraged as in Nineteenth Century USA
and other occasions when it has been discouraged, as in
contemporary USA. It has rarely been the case that restrictions
on both exit and entry have been treated equally for usually
economic conditions have favoured one or the other. The
determining factor has been whether a society had surplus labour
it wished to shed or whether it was short of labour.
In the Nineteenth Century many European countries encouraged
emigration to remove labour surpluses caused by the movement
of peasants to the towns. Britain was one of these but it also
encouraged emigration because it was a necessary condition for
colonial expansion. British citizens were needed to run the outposts
of the British Empire as well as to settle in congenial conquered
areas in Africa. In the post Second World War years Western
democracies generally allowed free emigration because it matched
their economic needs. Nonetheless some political restrictions on
outward movement were imposed. The McCarran Act of 1950
58
gave the State Department the power to deny exit rights to
anyone whose activities abroad might be detrimental to the
interests of the USA, as well as forbidding the issue of passports
to members of the Communist Party. There was the celebrated
case of Paul Robeson, the singer and political activist, who was
denied a passport in the 1950s and on whose behalf an
international campaign was mounted. The USA has also imposed
a blanket prohibition on travel to some countries, such as Cuba,
China, Vietnam and Korea at different times since 1945. This still
exists for Cuba and Vietnam.
While the freedom to emigrate has been elevated to the status
of a right this has not been the case with the freedom to immigrate.
Both the USA and Britain exercise strict controls over the right of
entry. All persons wishing to visit the USA for any purpose, even
for a day, have to complete long application forms with details of
their political and social lives. The granting of a visa, moreover, is
not permission to enter which is controlled by the immigration
authorities on the spot. There have been many instances of
British applicants being refused entry or subjected to time and
place restrictions. The 1965 US immigration law insists that
priority should be given to people with skills which would benefit
the society with the consequence that preferential treatment has
been given to educated professionals, such as medical doctors and
university teachers. It has always been easy for refugees from
socialist countries to obtain immigration rights though similar
rights have not been conferred on refugees from oppressive
regimes with which the US government has had friendly relations
such as South Korea, El Salvador or Guatemala. In Britain,
immigration is regulated by the British Nationality Act of 1981
under which it has become virtually impossible for black people
to enter Britain. This too has been a response to changing labour
market conditions. 8
Types of Democracy
The Western democracies project themselves as the only form
of democracy because to do otherwise would expose their claim
to be democratic to be challenged. If alternative democratic
forms were recognized or degrees of democracy admitted then
the citizens of the Western capitalist countries might begin asking
whether they possessed the most suitable form or whether they
might not be able to improve on what they had by altering some
59
of its conditions. But as democracy is about power-sharing it is
inexcusably dogmatic to assert that there can be only one form of
distribution of power.
Two main qualities are present in Western democracies. First
they are based on the premise that political decision-making is
not related in any sense to economic power and that, therefore, it
is possible to equalize the distribution of political power without
similarly distributing economic power. Campaigns for universal
suffrage were waged in Britain during the Nineteenth Century on
the assumption that somehow the extension of the suffrage
secret ballots and periodic elections would produce a more
equitable society but so complete has been the distinction
between political and economic power that none of the antici-
pated changes occurred. "One man, one vote 1 ' was not an
economic leveller.
This separation of political and economic power was not
fortuitous but was the main protection of the capitalist system
during the long process of political emancipation for workers.
Political freedom was never volunteered in Britain by the mixed
bag of landowners and the new bourgeoisie but so long as it had
no effect on the ownership of the means of production it could
safely be conceded in stages. In the USA political equality was
granted from the outset for white Americans through the
Constitution but this had not the slightest effect upon the
distribution of income, of wealth, of property at large and,
therefore, of economic power. Nor indeed when it was allowed to
black Americans did it remove the causes of discrimination
against them. There is not an automatic downward casual
relationship between political decision-making and economic
power. So long, therefore, as equality is confined to politics,
ignoring economic inequalities, then the system is relatively safe.
It would be misleading to see the present system of political
decision-making in Western capitalist countries as the result of
some kind of Machiavellian plot to protect the private ownership
of the means of production. It has been built on the structure of
capitalism, at one and the same time expressing its contradictions
as workers struggled for greater freedom yet alwavs doing so in a
manner which protected the essential structure of capitalism. It is
a reflection of the uncanny ways in which societies practise the art
of survival. The belief has been created that there is genuine
majority rule when every member of the electorate has one vote
from the poorest to the richest and can cast it in secret without
60
any formal constraints. This, however, in no way disturbs
minority control. The system would be perfect for the bourgeoisie
if it did not involve pretence, propaganda and deception to
prevent the working class from learning the truth about the
nature of power.
The second quality is that Western democracy is formal and
institutional; it is about the means of selecting governments and
the procedures which regulate their practice. Western democracy
passes no opinion about the results of government. To qualify as a
democracy a society has to grant universal suffrage, hold secret
elections and permit multiple parties to participate. It does not
have to govern in the interests of the majority except that
periodic elections may compel it to take those interests into
account in order to gain re-election. It is not an infringement of
Western democracy if a fascist government is elected. The
accession of Hitler to power in Germany in 1933 was done in a
perfectly constitutional way according to the democratic provi-
sions of the Weimar Republic. After the Second World War, a
major demand of the Western allies when effecting peace treaties
was that former enemy nations, Germany, Rumania, Hungary
and Bulgaria, should hold 'free" elections. It was of little concern
that an authoritarian government might be returned, that the old
land-owners might retain their power or that fascists might regain
their influence. The Western allies actually used some of the
Nazis and their collaborators, whom they had agreed at Yalta to
remove from influence, in their endeavour to establish formal
democratic forms. In Greece after 1945 the British government
left former fascist collaborators in power and crushed the anti-
fascist resistance in order to restore Western democratic
procedures. It was a rather cruel paradox. In the British,
American and French zones of defeated Germany the whole
cloth of Western democracy was clearly exposed. German
capitalists, including the industrial giants, Krupp and Thysson,
which had financed the Nazi war and Jewish extermination
machine, had their economic power restored through massive
injections of American capital, thus ensuring the continued
dominance of international capitalism; while a political edifice
was constructed involving free elections and multiple parties with
the participation of many who had exercised administrative and
political power during the Nazi period. The qualification to be
democratic did not involve Germans renouncing their fascist
beliefs but simply accepting the British and American way of
61
making political choices. Fascism did not have to be eradicated. It
was freshly packaged and given new labels to satisfy the conscience
of the Western allies. The new German democrats learned
quickly. In 1956 they outlawed the German Communist Party
which on the eve of the Nazi takeover in 1933 had had nearly
400,000 members and both led the struggle against Nazism and
suffered most from its impact. 9 The price for rejecting the
Western perception of democracy has always been high. It is
being paid in the 1980s by Nicaraguans and El Salvadorians.
The most serious consequence of defining democracy in terms
of procedures for making political chokes has been that there is
no belief in the West in the substance of democracy. What
happens in between elections is of little concern to the Western
democrats. Western democracy is an area of contending opinions
with not only no distinction between good and evil opinions but
with no feeling for good and evil. Anything and everything is
acceptable so long as the procedures are abided by. Because
authoritarian or fascist or physically oppressive political practice
could legitimately exist within the framework of democratic
procedures it has been relatively easy to undermine and destroy
them. Most of the Central and Eastern European countries,
including Germany, which were forced to establish Western
democratic procedures after 1918 as a condition for admission to
the 'free' world as independent states had rejected them by the
1930s in favour of unadorned authoritarian governments. The
Western conception of democracy was similarly forced on the
newly independent states of tropical Africa but there it has had an
even shorter existence. In other parts of the world, in Latin
America and Asia, the Western inspired political institutions
have crumbled through the firing of a few guns, the capture of a
radio station or a proclamation from an army barracks. A system
which is so frail that it cannot survive economic crises, which has
to be suspended in times of war, which has no resistance to
physical force, can surely claim no moral superiority over other
forms.
FOOTNOTES
1. In this chapter I have drawn on two areas of my own work, namely the
pamphlet ' Images and Reality of the Soviet Union", 1983, and a
forthcoming book Trade Unionism in the Soviet Union.
2. Detail for this map is taken from: Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union, by
Shirim Akiner, London, 1983, pp. 14-15. It has been adapted by the
62
Graphics Department of the University of Leeds. Akiners book contains a
comprehensive and detailed description of the Soviet Muslim population.
3. The Road to Serfdom, by F A von Hayek, 1944, ch. X.
4. See The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Principles of Political
Economy by David Ricardo.
5 . The Soviet Impact on the Western World, op cit , p . 7 .
6. See COLLAR the LOT. How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime
Refugees, by Peter and Leni Gillman, 1980.
7. See Szymanski, op cit, pp. 13-26 for an historical survey of the international
movement of labour.
8. See Immigration Control Procedures: Report of a Formal Investigation,
Commission for Racial Equality, London, 1985, for an examination of the
restrictions on black immigrants.
9. See Beating the Fascists? by Eve Rosenhaft, 1983, for a penetrating
historical analysis of the confrontation between communists and Nazis from
1929 till 1933.
63
Chapter Five
Soviet Democracy
When the Civil War in Russia was reaching its height and the
new Bolshevik state was under threat from the intervention of the
Western powers in the autumn of 1918, Lenin wrote a rebuttal of
a pamphlet by Karl Kautsky called The Dictatorship of the
Proletariat which had recently been published. Kautsky was a
veteran and influential leader of the German Social-Democratic
Party who had been involved in the historic debate about marxist
revisionism with Edouard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg in
1899. His position changed during the First World War when,
according to Lenin, he presented "a blend of loyalty to Marxism
in word and subordination to opportunism in deed." 1 He was
frequently and increasingly criticized by Lenin for turning "Marx
into a common liberal". The offence, however, which spurred
Lenin to action in 1918 was Kautsky's description of Bolshevism
as dictatorial. Kautsky presented the Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik
strands in the Socialist Movement as "the contrast between two
radically different methods: the dictatorial and the democratic."
For Lenin, this raised a fundamental question which was the very
essence of proletarian revolution and he was stung into staking
the new Bolshevik state's claim to be democratic. "Proletarian
democracy", he wrote, "of which Soviet government is one of the
forms, has brought a development and expansion of democracy
unprecedented in the world, for the vast majority of the
population, for the exploited and working people . . .Proletarian
democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois
democracy: Soviet power is a million times more democratic than
the most democratic bourgeois republic. To fail to see this one
must either deliberately serve the bourgeoisie, or be politically as
dead as a doornail, unable to see real life from behind the dusty
pages of bourgeois books . . " 2 Stalin expressed similar sentiments
when he described the new Soviet Constitution in 1936. These
claims were in direct contrast with the Western stereotype of the
Soviet Union and for that reason they were ridiculed. But, as E.
64
H. Carr warned, it "would be a mistake to dismiss such pro-
nouncements as mere propaganda or humbug" and dangerous to
regard them as having no relevance for the West by treating
"Soviet democracy as primarily a Russian phenomenon without
roots in the West or without application to western conditions." 3
The basis for Lenin's claim was that economic and political
power in Bolshevik Russia had been transferred from a minority
bourgeois class to a majority working class. No matter what form
of political representation was instituted to enable the working
class to govern this was unquestionably an improvement. His
argument was based on the assumption that it falsified the
definition of power to separate economic from political power.
How can there be political equality, he asked "between the
exploited and the exploiters"? 4 Because he believed that democracy
had an economic basis, there could never be a pure form. "Pure
democracy", he stated, "is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who
wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy
which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy
which takes the place of bourgeois democracy." 5 In other words,
democracy reflects the class basis of society and as that widens,
giving economic power to the majority, then so must democracy
be more extensive and real. "Bourgeois democracy", Lenin
insisted, "although a great historical advance in comparison with
medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to
remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise
for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the
poor." 6
(i) The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
The definition of democracy in terms of class rule gives
meaning to the concept 'the dictatorship of the proletariat'. It
simply means rule by the proletarian class in its own interests
instead of 4 the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie' for its own
interests. There always has to be class rule, therefore there is
always a dictatorship by one class or another. The concept has
nothing to do with totalitarian government or indeed with any
particular form of government. Tt is an analytical description of
the basis of political decision-making in society and it is in this
sense that it has been used in the Soviet Union. It is wrong, there-
fore, to conceptualize the Soviet form of dictatorship as being
similar to that practised by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or Pinochet.
65
Indeed, those dictators and bourgeois democracy had much in
common for they served similar class interests.
The concept of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' has played a
vital and continuous part in the history of the Soviet Union for it
has been not merely a description of a form of democracy but an
expression of the Revolution as something real, permanent and
continuous. It is a key to understanding much of the behaviour of
the Soviet Union both as a social organism and in its relations
with other countries. When workers' and soldiers' Soviets achieved
power in 1917 it was a complete victory, not a step in a transitional
process or a bourgeois revolution on the historical route to
socialism. Any moves, therefore, to accommodate to hostile
capitalist forces would have weakened the Revolution by eroding its
base. Compromises with private capital such as concessions to
attract international capital or political agreements to share power
with contending political forces in the manner of pluralism would
have been backward steps and admissions that the Revolution had
been over hasty and too ambitious. The Bolsheviks, therefore,
rejected such action in order to protect the working class as the
suppository of state power. Where they did compromise, as when
Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921 , it was to avert
economic collapse. As soon as that possibility was removed then the
compromise was ended. There was no permanent middle way. The
Bolshevik leaders had to choose their course. They decided to
maintain the working class as the sole and absolute source of state
power. The history of the Soviet Union has been dominated by the
consequences of that choice.
The commitment of the Bolshevik leaders to working class power
transformed the Bolshevik Revolution from being a single, isolated
historical event, confined to the month of November in the year
1917, like the end of a war, the birth of a monarch or the
assassination of a president, to an historical process without bound-
aries or time limitations. Therefore, the Revolution was always
being waged in the sense that as both the symbol of the struggle for
working class power and the source of that power it became mystified
and sanctified in much the same way as property rights have been
treated as the sacred source of bourgeois power in capitalist
countries. The rights of private property have been written into
constitutions, buttressed by laws and sanctified by ideology. In
some countries they have become inviolate, protected by the laws
of treason in a desperate attempt to facilitate the survival of their
power structures.
66
A consequence of the dictatorship of the proletariat and, at the
same time, its moral foundation is the absolute belief in proletarian
democracy which pervades Soviet society. The rational basis for
belief is that unless the majority class holds power the
Drkers cannot exercise it through economic and political decision-
making processes. The preservation of unsullied working class
vwer is then a necessary condition for democratic activity. This
edition is not subject to modification in any way. Soviet
democracy has never been prepared to countenance the possibility
of its own destruction, whether or not a majority wished it, as is
the case in Western democracies. There is no possibility of any
individual or group being given the right to challenge the legiti-
lacy of working class power. Indeed it is regarded as immoral to
ant to do so. This constraint is not generally seen as an infringe-
ment of individual liberty but as a means of protecting it by
preserving the rights of workers as a class. Soviet people are as
erturbed and puzzled by the Western tolerance of anti -democratic
activities in the name of democracy as the West is critical of the
Soviet lack of tolerance for such activities.
(ii) The One-Party State
The second major consequence of the struggle to preserve the
Revolution relates to the position of the Communist Party in
Soviet society. A major criticism of the Soviet Union by the West
is that it is a one-party state and is therefore undemocratic. The
political dominance of the Communist Party, however, is a
oduct of Soviet history. In the period between the Revolution
d 1922 non-Bolshevik working class parties, the Mensheviks
nd the Right Social Revolutionaries operated freely. There was,
at the same time, an intense debate conducted by factions within
the Bolshevik Party. The major figues in the Revolution, Lenin,
otsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin, belonged to different and
changing groups. This situation altered through the exigencies of
war and the attempts of parties and groups to undermine the
evolution for their own ends. The intervention of the Allies and
the Civil War created many opportunities for counter-revolu-
tionary activities. The Left Social Revolutionaries who had co-
rperated with the Bolsheviks on the Council of People's Commis-
sars until July 1918 attempted an armed insurrection in that same
month. At the end of August, Dora Kaplan, a Social Revolutionary,
tried to assassinate Lenin, seriously wounding him with a bullet in
the lung above the heart and another in his neck. An earlier
67
attempt had been made on his life on 1st January 1918, as he was
returning by car from a meeting with Fritz Platten, the secretary
of the Swiss Social-Democratic Party. Lenin was unhurt but
Platten was wounded. Some members of the government were
assassinated; the lives of others were threatened. Both the Men-
sheviks and the Right Social Revolutionary Parties refused to
support the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the Civil War then
changed their minds. They were represented in the Soviets where
they expressed their vacillating attitudes towards the Bolshevik
regime. This all occurred at a most critical time for the Bolsheviks
when they controlled only a rump in European Russia with
Petrograd under threat and plans being laid for the evacuation of
the government from Moscow. The Bolshevik Party responded
by resolving on 2nd September, 1918 that "To the White terror of
the enemies of the workers* and peasants' government, the
workers and peasants will reply with mass ^Red terror' against the
bourgeoisie and its agents."
The Civil War left its own legacy. The railway system, which
was the lifeline of the economy, broke down through physical
destruction and depreciation. Industry was starved of raw
materials and incapacitated by military action. There were acute
shortages of manufactured goods. The countryside too was
disrupted. Frequently, even where the peasants had grain and
foodstuffs, they refused to release them for the industrial
workers, thus considerably worsening their plight and making the
production of manufactured goods more hazardous. The various
sections of the Soviet economy passed on the effects of the war to
each other and thus compounded the problems each one faced.
The economy was on a downward spiral. 7
The most destructive effect was on the morale of the industrial
workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors who had supported the
Revolution in 1917 and had sustained it throughout the Civil War.
Once the military pressures were removed in 1920 the participants
were able to stand back and ask themselves what had been
achieved. All they could see were controls, requisitioning, acute
shortages and real starvation causing many deaths. The Revolu-
tionary fervour which had brought military victory had to be
sustained by some material gains and there were none available.
Many people, ground down by the past and the present, became
disillusioned with Bolshevism. Once the Allied military interven-
tion had failed, the greatest threat to the Bolshevik system came
in its aftermath, through its own contradictions. This was
6N
expressed by outbreaks of peasant unrest; by what Lenin called
"banditism - where tens and hundreds of thousands of demobil-
ized soldiers, who are accustomed to the toils of war and regard it
almost as their only trade return, impoverished and ruined, and
are unable to find work"; 8 by strikes and demonstrations in
Petrograd and Moscow and at the beginning of March 1921 , by a
mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base where the Baltic Fleet had its
headquarters. .
The Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party met
while the Kronstadt mutiny was under way and Lenin's speech
there dealt with it in relation to what he described as "crop
failure, a crisis, ruin and demobilization". He saw evidence of a
petty bourgeois counter-revolution which he regarded as more
dangerous than all the White Russian Generals put together.
Under such circumstances the Revolution could have dis-
appeared like a whisp of smoke. Lenin's remedy was to try and
heal the breach between workers and peasants and intensify the
unity of the Communist Party. He said: "We must bear in mind
that the bourgeoisie is trying to pit the peasants against the
workers; that behind a facade of workers' slogans it is trying to
incite the petty-bourgeois anarchist elements against the workers.
This, if successful, will lead directly to the overthrow of the
dictatorship of the proletariat and, consequently, to the restora-
tion of capitalism and of the old landowner and capitalist regime.
The political danger here is obvious. A number of revolutions
have clearly gone that way; we have been mindful of this
possibilitv and have warned against it. This undoubtedly demands
of the ruling party of Communists, and of the leading revolution-
ary elements of the proletariat a different attitude to the one we
have time and again displayed over the past year. It is a danger
that undoubtedly calls for much greater unity and discipline."
The Tenth Congress agreed to proposals which led to the New
Economic Policy and eased the tensions on peasants. It also
banned organized factions in the Communist Party, called for
their dissolution and reminded them that "Everyone who
criticizes in public must keep in mind the situation of the Party in
the midst of the enemies by which it is surrounded . . Other
political parties were banned by 1921 so the Communist Party
assumed its role as the sole political party and took its first official
step towards eliminating dissent in its own ranks. It became the
sole custodian of the Revolution in a political format which still
operates.
69
The Bolshevik Party 10 , though it shared government with the
Left Social Revolutionaries until July 1918, always was the ruling
party in Soviet Russia. It made the decision to wage an armed
struggle and gave the Revolution its shape and direction. The
Bolshevic state with its new superstructure was the creation of the
Bolshevik leaders, So too was the state economic planning
mechanism. The communist leaders took all the major decisions
between 1917 and 1921. They dissolved the elected Constituent
Assembly on 20 January 1918 when it conflicted with the All-
Russian Congress of Soviets and framed the declaration made a
week later which stated "Russia is declared a republic of
workers". They drafted the first Constitution passed at the Fifth
Congress of Soviets in July 1918 which guaranteed the dictator-
ship of the proletariat for the purposes of "suppressing the
bourgeoisie, abolishing the exploitation of man by man, and
establishing Socialism 1 ', The Bolsheviks formed the Extraordin-
ary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage
(the CHEKA); they banned the Right Social Revolutionary and
Menshevik Parties from participating in the Soviets in June 1918
and lifted the banning order later that year; they also made the
decisions as to whether or not non-Bolshevik publications should
be circulated. There was no question that from the moment a
Bolshevik government was formed in November 1917, the
Bolshevik Party monopolised political activity as a means of
maintaining the dictatorship of the proletariat through intensify-
ing crises and that without it the Revolution would have been
reversed. 11 Thus the events in 1921 merely formalized and
institutionalized an already existing power situtation.
The special conditions in the early life of Soviet Russia which
led to the dominance of the Communist Party were present in
varying degrees throughout most of its history. The country was
continually subjected to threats, implicit or overt, during the
inter-war years. Stalin talked in the late 1920s about the
possibility of being invaded and then, in June 1941, the invasion
occurred. Until that time the Soviet Union had lived as in a seige,
surrounded by hostile nations^ economically and militarily weak
in comparison with its capitalist protagonists. It had become
fearful to the point of being psychoneurotic about threats to its
borders and counter-revolutionary tendencies within them. None
of these threats was imaginery. Lenin spoke of the consequential
behaviour of the Soviet government. "We were forced to use
terror" he stated "in response to the terror employed by the
70
Entente, when the mighty powers of the world flung their hordes
against us, stopping at nothing. We could not have lasted two
days had we not replied to these attempts of officers and
whiteguards in a merciless fashion. This meant the use of
terror . . ." 12 The scale of the White Russian terror can be
gauged from the fact that in Rostov alone the White Russian
occupying forces shot about 25,000 workers. 13 For the govern-
ment, survival entailed imposing extraordinary disciplinary-
measures. Yet opposition groups within the Communist Party
continued to operate openly until 1929. The prominent leaders of
different groups, contended with each other on questions of trade
unions, agriculture, industrialization and foreign policy. This
tolerance ceased in 1928 when renewed domestic and inter-
national pressures produced a radical change both in the
organization of Soviet society and its international perspectives.
The leaders of the opposition in the Party, Leon Trotsky and
Grigori Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party on 14
November, 1927 by the 15th Congress. Trotsky was sent into exile
in Central Asia and. early in 1929, was forced to leave the
country.
A different perception of the one-party state emerged after
1928 and was expressed by Stalin in 1936 when he introduced the
revised Soviet Constitution which made provision for only one
political party, namely the Communist Party. The programme of
collectivization in agriculture and the First Five Year Plan from
1929 created a high degree of class homogeneity by destroying
free markets, eliminated the profit-motive and dispossessing the
rich peasants. The last remnants of capitalism were dismantled.
Thereafter all Soviet citizens were either workers or peasants.
There were no antagonistic class relations in the capitalist sense in
the Soviet Union from that period. The question then was
whether a multi-party system could operate in such a situation.
Stalin answered it when he said:
"A party is a part of a class, its most advanced part.
Several parties, and consequently freedom for parties,
can exist only in a society in which there are antagon-
istic classes whose interests are mutually hostile and
irreconcilable - in which there are, say, capitalists and
workers, landlords and peasants, kulaks and poor
peasants, etc. But in the USSR there are no longer such
classes as the capitalists, the landlords, the kulaks etc.
71
In the USSR there are only two classes, workers and
peasants, whose interests - far from being mutually
hostile - are on the contrary friendly. Hence there is no
ground in the USSR for the existence of several parties,
and consequently for freedom for these parties ... In
the USSR only one party can exist - the Communist
Party . , ." 14
This analysis was essentially valid. There were undoubtedly
contradictions along the Soviet road to socialism which created
new social class formations. Even when Statin was speaking in
1936 the Soviet leadership in Moscow was trying to solve the twin
problems of inertia and repression by the middle levels of the
state and party bureaucracy. Indeed in 1937 radicals in the
Communist Party used the democratic provisions of the new
Constitution as a weapon against the bureaucracy. 15 A closer
analysis of the working class and the peasantry might have shown
other divisions between town and country, industries and
occupations. But none had permanent structural causes. Nor
were the emerging relationships antagonistic in the sense of
having permanently opposing interests which were irreconcilable
and which, therefore, posed contrary courses for the development
of the Soviet economy. There may have been individuals who
believed that their own special needs could best be served by a
return to capitalism but there were no groups or classes in that
position. For this reason, there were no interests which were
sufficiently clear and entrenched that they needed separate
permanent institutional rights. No group's political rights there-
fore was harmed by the constitutional provision for a single
political party. The Communist Party, in any event, was not a
political monolith into which different interests were compressed
but an organization which depended for its vitality on the extent
to which it reflected the diverse interests of the society.
One further point which needs to be taken into account in
connection with the Western aversion to a single party state is
that the material conditions in the Soviet Union had given rise to
political needs which could not have been met by a multiparty
system of the West, where each party feeds on the discomforture,
embarrassment and failures of the others. The persistent need in
Soviet Russia and subsequently in the Soviet Union was for a
politically unifying force which in the first instance could spread
the virtues of socialism and then, by example, display the
72
economic, social and political behaviour consistent with socialist
values. Thus the Communist Party which had evolved in Czarist
Russia as a cadre party retained the need to remain as a cadre
party after the Revolution and to provide leadership in all aspects
of the life of the society. Throughout its history the Communist
Party members were the first to lead by example. This was so
during the Civil War when the cadres volunteered for the Red
Army; after the Civil War when they created the concept of free
labour and devised what were called Subbotniks; during the early
1930s when they worked for the implementation of the collect-
ivization programme; later in the 1930s when they led the drive
for higher productivity with the Stakhanovite Movement; and
during the Second World War when they maintained the socialist
fabric of the society even in defeat and organized armed
resistance to the German occupying forces. Thus the Communist
Party's function has always been to reflect the society's needs and
then tackle them through socialist action. It has had both a
populist and mobilizing function which has not depended upon
pandering to the vacillating tastes of people or on persuading the
electorate through various and devious public relations tech-
niques to give its endorsement. It has a legal as well as political
responsibility to provide leadership. The 1977 Constitution of the
USSR states this in Article 6: "The leading and guiding force of
Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state
organizations and public organizations, is the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union ..." A prominent feature of the life of the
Communist Party has been its concern about its function as a
cadre party. This concern lay behind much of the turbulence in
the Party during the 1930s when there were purges and trials of
members. It has resulted in much self-criticism and self-
examination of the kind which would be anathema to Western
political parties.
The dictatorship of the proletariat and the one-party state must
be seen as part of one totality arising out of the same historical
and material conditions. They both rest on the premise, in the
first instance, that a society can only be democratic if the majority
class, namely the working class, holds power. This is more than a
necessary condition for effective democracy because, irrespective
of forms of representation, workers exercise power through the
ordinary day-to-day affairs involved in managing industry and the
economy at large in much the same way as the bourgeoisie
exercises power through its ownership and control of the means
73
of production. Workers, therefore, take decisions concerning
investment, what to produce, where and on what scale, which
they are precluded from making where there is private industry,
In other words they contribute substantially towards determining
their own quality of life. Irrespective of other factors this must be
much more democratic than when they are mere sellers of labour
power.
Once the members of the working class hold power then the
completion of their control over it depends upon the methods
they devise for political representation. A defective or inadequate
method of representation may have seriously adverse con-
sequences but they will be reversible, for in a socialist society
political representation is a matter for experimentation and is not
an issue of princple. The most likely defect to occur is through the
failure of the Communist Party to represent society's needs
adequately. This has been the experience of the Soviet Union.
And although some of the failings have resulted in setbacks they
have never had permanent and fundamental consequences for the
nature of the society. On a number of occasions deviations have
been corrected and wrongs have been righted. This was the case
after the death of Stalin and is being further illustrated by the
democratic measures introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev. This is
indicative of the strength of Soviet democracy. The working class
in power always has the means at its disposal to return to the path
of socialism.
Dissent
The summation of all the Western criticisms of Soviet democ-
racy is that Soviet citizens are not free as individuals to criticize,
oppose or change the political system. It is assumed that it is
inconceivable that individuals would naturally refrain from
making political criticisms or be disinterested in political opposi-
tion and that conformity had to be achieved, therefore, through
physical restrictions on individual freedom. Thus the logic of
Western thinking is that Soviet society is dominated by mechanisms
of control such as the KGB, the Communist Party and various
agencies of the state. An image of a Soviet monolith is
constructed in which people are frightened, furtive, unsmiling,
afraid to speak their minds, always anticipating the early morning
police raid, reconciled to arbitrary arrests. Such a society could
only be ruled by fear.
74
The societal contexts in which individuals obtain rights and
exercise freedoms vary from one country to another depending
upon the class structure and historical experience of each one.
Even countries with similar class structures have taken different
routes to individual freedom as was indicated in the previous
chapter. The class structure of a society determines the substance
of individual freedom. If that is changed then the conception of
individuality changes too. The notion of an individual, the
relationships between individuals and between individuals and
society are qualitatively different in a socialist society compared
with a capitalist one. When looking at the political rights of Soviet
people, then, it has to be recognized first that they live in a wholly
different structural context from people in the West and could
never be like they are, enjoy similar liberties and suffer similar
disabilities.
The Soviet Union is a collectivist society. The assumption
underlying all activity there is that collective interests are prior to
individual ones. This does not mean that individuals are
neglected or subordinated for it is assumed that individuals fulfil
themselves more through collectivism than in fragmented free
markets. Indeed, the whole purpose of switching to common
ownership is to obtain those benefits. Individuality, according to
this view, is enriched by enhancing the interests of communities.
Tt has two main consequences. First, most but not all decision-
making is conducted through collectives. Second, individuals are
not permitted the freedom to act contrary to the perceived
interests of the collectives.
Under socialism the state itself is a collective. Individuals,
therefore, are expected to subordinate themselves to it in order to
enhance Soviet society at large. It would be immoral for any
persons to project their own special interests in defiance of the
wider community. A further constraint on individual action is
created by the Soviet view that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'
is inviolate. No individual has the right to challenge the power
which the Bolshevik Revolution brought the working class. No
tolerance is extended to anyone who wants to undermine or
subvert that power or to introduce other forms of power such as
bourgeois democracy. These constraints are facts of life in the
Soviet Union and permeate Soviet culture. The vast majority of
Soviet people accept them as readily as the majority of Britons
accept parliamentary democracy.
The Soviet treatment of dissidence, therefore, has not resulted
75
from the arbitrary use of authoritarianism but is derived from its
conception of democracy. The detail of the treatment, however
has been determined by historical circumstances, varying both in
method and intensity. Clara Kaplan and other would-be Lassins
of Lenin the Social Revolutionaries who aimed for a coup d ' e ta
fh" r, S ene ™?.\ oi the Bolshevik state were countered by
the Red Terror Violence was countered by violence. After
factions withm the Communist Party were banned m 1921 their
composition and policies changed but they remained in existence
and argued about political directions until 1928. During that
period there was a high level of political diversity with many
fZT PT rT g h ° USeS a " d non "P art y j™™als operating. The
leadersof the opposition groups were sometimes penalized by
being demoted, expelled from the Party or sent into exile but
many were later rehabilitated, sometimes back into leadership
positions. Many ot Trotsky's supporters were released m 1928
and restored to Party positions. Some, Bukharin, Zinoviev
Kamenev, Rykov and Tomsky who had held senior Partv
Cir'^t 11 !^ b K Ck int ° the higher eche,ons of the
Party. Bukharin who lost his membership of the Politburo
1929 r 't ,P °\ PraVd / m t V hC chair "P <* the Comintern in
929 returned as editor ot the government newspaper, Izvestia, in
^ r had bc ™ d ^missed from his chairmanship of
tt Pol Wolt Vh 10tl C ° Uncil in 1929 and lost his l^itulm
the Po tburo at the same time, remained on the Central
Committee of the Communist Party and was re-elected in 1930
Zinoviev and Kamenev were expelled from the Party in 1927 re-
aSn m 4 i Th ng yea % CX Pf ed ^ ^33 but readmitted
again m 1934. This period embraced the First Five Year Plan
and the major part of the collectivization of agriculture involving
tlTuT" 0t 'k 6 daSS Stmgg ' e im ° thc ^^tryside, but it waf
described, even by critics of the Soviet Union" as a "libera
communist stage".' 7 ' "oerai
The Purges
The period which has been used more than any other to
discredit the Soviet Union followed the assassination of S M
Kirov on 1st December 1934, a member of the Politburo, recent™
elected Secretary of the Central Committee and the F " t
Secretary of the Leningrad Party Committee. It lasted until 1939
I he events of those years attracted much adverse criticism at the
76
time in the West but it was not until the height of the Cold War
that they featured as a major indictment of the Soviet Union.
Kirov was shot in his office by a young communist, Leonid
Nikolaev. There was much speculation about Nikolaev's associ-
ates. He was linked with enemies of the state. Repressive
counter-measures were introduced by the government such as
summary trials of suspected terrorists, the suspension of the right
of appeal and mandatory death penalties. In the period which
followed there were a number of occasions on which, for different
easons, communist leaders and officials were arrested, tried and
executed. Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed for treason and
sabotage in 1936; Piatakov and Radek were executed in 1937 and
the next year Bukharin and Rykov similarly lost their lives. At
the end of September 1936, after a series of explosions at the
Kemerovo Mines in Western Siberia in which a dozen miners
were killed, N I Ezhov was appointed as head of the NKVD.
During Ezhov' s spell of office many amongst the leadership of the
Communist Party and the army were arrested and executed. By
the beginning of 1939, those who had suffered in this way
included all the members of the Politburo during Lenin's time
except Stalin and 98 of the 139 members and candidate members
of the Central Committee of the CP elected at the 1934 Congress.
1,108 out of the 1,966 delegates to that Congress were arrested.
The head of the Red Army, Marshal Tukhachevsky and other
army leaders were arrested in June 1937 and then shot for
treason. Thc regional leadership of the Party and the middle
echelons of the army were virtually entirely displaced: many were
arrested and an unknown number were executed. People talked
of "the Ezhovshchina", which meant the time of Ezhov.
Western Sovietologists have fitted the events between 1933 and
1939 to match the stereotype of a totalitarian, dictator-led
country which had no concern for the human rights of its citizens.
For this purpose they made three assumptions about them.
Firstly, they lumped everything in those years into a single
totality and called it the "Great Purge" or the "Great Terror".
Having done that they made a second assumption that the totality
had a single cause, namely Stalin. To complete the picture they
assumed, thirdly, that the "'Purge" or "Terror" had been
conducted on a mammoth scale, pervading the whole of Soviet
society.
Until recently virtually all Western analysts of the Soviet Union
made these three assumptions and set about producing figures of
77
communists who were expelled from the Party, who were
arrested, who were tried and executed, in order to confirm their
validity. The Soviet government had published details of expul-
sions from the Communist Party but had provided no data about
arrests and executions. The Western Sovietologists were only
interested in those who were arrested and imprisoned. Offenders
under the Soviet Penal Code in the 1930s could be sentenced to
one of three types of punishment. Firstly, they could be
compelled to engage in community work without confinement or
to stay at their normal place of work and contribute up to 25 per
cent of their pay to the state. Second, they could be exiled to
remote parts of the Soviet Union without confinement but be
compelled to engage in particular work projects. They were not
allowed to leave their places of exile until their sentences had
been served. Lastly, they could be sent to corrective labour
camps administered from about 1929 by a central government
department called the Gulag. The Sovietologists have concen-
trated on this last category and for much of the post-war period
have been guessing the size of the forced labour camp population
in the 1930s. This numbers game became the central issue for
them.
The problem they all faced was that they had no statistical base
with which to start so in order to present their case they engaged
in an inventive, complex and ingenious deductive process. The
first comprehensive study of the Soviet labour camp situation was
Forced Labour in Soviet Russia by D J Dallin and B 1
Nicolaevsky, in 1948. The authors looked for evidence from
every conceivable source: "estimates of former officials, former
camp inmates, foreign visitors to the Soviet Union, figures based
on the reports of former Polish prisoners, estimates based on the
numbers and sizes of known camps and camp clusters and . . .
estimates based on the reported numbers of newspapers received
by places of detention and the reported number of inmates who
shared a newspaper." 18 They also reviewed the available data on
the scale of economic activities carried out by different parts of
the labour camp network. They concluded that the population of
Soviet labour camps rose from 2 million in 1932 to 10 million by
1941 , when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. S G Wheatcroft
has described in some detail how various subsequent calculations
have been made in an article in Soviet Studies in April 1981. Some
discovered new ways of calculating the penal population such as
estimating the number of disenfranchised people and assuming
78
that they would be in labour camps. But what is interesting is how
the guesses of one became the statistical base for another until the
assumptions underlying the original were lost from sight and
mind.
The most publicized description of Soviet labour camps was
that by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipeligo
published in 1973. Many in the West had their image of the Soviet
Union reinforced by his partly anecdotal, partly fictionalized
story. He asserted, without any empirical evidence, that there
had been 12 million people in labour camps at the end of the
1930s, of which 6 million were political prisoners. 19 Solzhenitsyn's
figures were sheer invention but were nonetheless used by others
as indisputable facts. But the most influential accounts were the
reputedly academic ones by Zbigniew Brzezinski who wrote The
Permanent Purge in 1956, eight years after leaving Poland as an
emigre, and Robert Conquest, whose book, The Great Terror,
published in 1968, contains a statistical appendix under the
heading of "Casualty Figures". The estimates of Brzezinski and
Conquest entered into anti-Soviet folklore. Both contributed
substantially to the grossly exaggerated and distorted picture of
the 'purges'. Zbigniew Brzezinski, commenting on the crucial 18
month period of the Ezhovshchina, January 1937 to June 1938.
claimed that during that time 850,000 members were expelled
from the Communist Party and that most of them were arrested.
This figure was 'worked on' and added to by subsequent writers.
Brzezinski, however, had made the elementary but intellectually
inexcusable mistake of getting his dates wrong. The number of
expelled members he quoted referred to the 7 year period from
1932 till 1939 not the 18 month period as claimed by Brzezinski.
Moreover there was no correlation between membership expul-
sions and arrests except in Brzezinski's mind. He had no data on
which to base his correlation. He simply made an unverifiable
assumption to provide himself with a statistic which then entered
the records as a historical fact. Nonetheless, Robert Conquest
referred to Brzezinski's figure as a "careful estimate" in his book,
The Great Terror. He later admitted that Brzezinski had confused
his dates but refused to amend his own estimate, based on
Brzezinski's, that there were a million arrests of party members
between 1936 and 1939. Conquest cited a claim by Andrei
Sakharov, in support of his own estimate, that "in 1936 to 1939
alone more than 1,2 million party members, half of the total
membership, were arrested." 20 But Sakharov's figure, like that of
79
Solzhcnitsyn, was imaginery. Communist Party records show that
between "October 1936 and the end of 1937 in the terrifying years
of the Ezhovshchina only 108,000 party members were expelled
and just under half this number, 46,000, were re-instated." 21
Taking the longer period from May, 1935 till January, 1939
between 200,000 and 240,000 party members were expelled and
not re-instated. There is no data which shows how many of these
were arrested. Thus this was the way in which the contorting lines
of the stereotype were drawn.
Robert Conquest has remained as an authority in the numbers
games. He claimed that 9 million people were in labour camps by
1939. To substantiate this figure he drew on the work of S
Swianiewicz as well as Brzezinski. Swianiewicz, in his book
Forced Labour and Economic Development: an enquiry into the
experience of Soviet Industrialization, published in 1965. had
estimated that there had been just under 7 million labour camp
inmates in 1940. There was a process, it seems, of upward
revision. Each analyst claimed to throw new light on the topic,
took earlier calculations, refined them and produced a new and
higher figure. Conquest added interpretation to Swianicwicz's
"careful and conservative estimate'' 22 which inflated the total by 2
million. Swianiewicz, however, had based his own estimate on
the calculations made by N Jasny in an article called "Labour and
Output in Soviet Concentration Camps", published in the Journal
of Political Economy, No 59 in 1952. Jasny 's figure had been a
modest 3.5 million to which Swianiewicz had added some
arbitrary estimates which doubled it. These calculations had no
serious empirical basis and should never have been taken
seriously by social scientists. In the pure and natural sciences they
would have been ridiculed. Yet they have not ended.
The controversy about labour camp numbers in the 1930s was
rekindled by an American, Steven Rosefielde, from the Univers-
ity of North Carolina, in 1981. He took Conquest's figure and
added supplementary data from what he called new insights into
the scale of the phenomenon. 23 The total figure crept up to
between 9 million and 11.2 million. 24 Rosefielde, like Conquest,
cited unsubstantiated claims to support his own. With some
enthusiasm he referred to a statement by W. Averell Harriman,
former US Ambassador in Moscow, to the effect that there were
12 million forced labourers in the Gulag in the early 1940s. 25
Harriman's figure was based, he claimed, on US Embassy data
but though the Embassy files have been declassified the claim has
80
never been substantiated. Rosefielde was keen to show that all
the high figures produced out of hats by Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov
and Harriman, were statistically reliable. His motive for doing
this and for reviving the controversy was based purely in anti-
Sovietism. He stated "one might have supposed that many
scholars would have inferred that the success of the Soviet
industrialization drive after 1929 was to some significant degree
the result of Stalin's forced labour policies. This, however, has
not been the case . . . This paper . . . makes it plain that Soviet
economic development cannot be properly understood unless
forced labour is endogenized into the growth process." 26 Rose-
fielde thus moved in the tradition of his predecessors. He united
with DalHn and Nicolaevsky, the social democrats; Jasny the
friend of Mensheviks; Brzezinski the emigre Pole and Conquest
the middle-class English writer, all intensely anti-communist,
who utilized their intellectual skills to subvert Soviet communism
rather than to reveal and understand the real social forces which
comprise the Soviet Union. This was surely an intellectually
devious and dishonest process.
Tt was not necessary to guess about everything. Communist
Party memberships, numbers and rates of expulsion, were
regularly published and T H Rigby used this data for his book,
Communist Party Membership in the USSR 1917-1967, published
by the Russian Institute of Columbia University in 1968. The
book is a valuable data bank which corrects important errors in
the works of Brzezinski and Conquest. But Rigby was a conform-
ing creature of his Cold War environment and he placed his own
calculations within the same distorted analytical box as the others
so that its outcome was pre-determined. He saw Stalin's lonely
hand in all the 1930s events and believed, even, that he had
planned them beforehand. 27
Brzezinski, Conquest, Rigby and others obtained their data
from a variety of sources, but most of it was anecdotal, obtained
from emigrees and defectors invariably with limited knowledge
and usually with the bias of disaffected people. This heavy
reliance on unsubstantiated statements was accompanied by a
dismissal of official Soviet sources. Conquest endeavoured to give
intellectual credibility to this position, which he in particular
adopted. "In a totalitarian country", he wrote, "the question of
evidence assumes a special form. No particular credence can be
attached to official pronouncements, many of which, indeed, are
extravagant falsehoods. The truth can thus only percolate in the
81
form of hearsay . . . But of course not all hearsay and not all
rumour is true. On political matters basically the best, though not
infallible, source is rumour at a high political and police level", 2S
On no other subject could rumour be elevated to the status of a
source of research information. The data then on which many
anti-Soviet works were founded came largely from the recollec-
tions of Mensheviks, Trotskyists, former Cadets, ex-army officers,
intelligence agents, diplomats. The basis of Brzezinski's work was
his analysis of the sample of 2,725 relatives of Soviet emigre's
who had served sentences in prison camps during the 1930s. Anti-
Sovietism is built into this source of information.
The same intellectual stricture can be levied against the work of
Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, published in the USA in 1971
but written in Moscow. Medvedev is a Soviet citizen but this was
not a particular advantage, except that he was physically nearer
source material than Western writers. The test of a writer s
understanding of a situation does not depend on being there or
necessarily being a part of it but on the method of analysis used.
Medvedev was a child in the 1930s; his father suffered from the
repression towards the end of the decade. Medvedev, however,
was acutely critical of bourgeois historians who analyzed the
Soviet Union from a u plainly anti-Soviet view". He accused
foreign publications of mixing "invention and rumour, factual
inaccuracies and distortions in their accounts . . " 29 Yet his own
work was intended to reveal Stalin's guilt for the events of the
1930s and to locate the cause in Stalin's criminal character. His
work, in consequence, was largely biographical and was uninform-
ative about social forces. It was as self-fulfilling as that of
Conquest - like a trial in which the presumption of guilt is made
before it begins its examination of the evidence. Its empirical
base was as deficient as that of the Western Sovietologists for he
too depended on recollections, anecdotes and interviews pro-
vided by surviving Party members after 1956. It all makes
interesting reading but throws little light on the causes of the
events with which it purports to deal.
The only substantial source of archival material in the West
which relates directly to the events in the 1930s, and which would
pass the test of the most intellectually scrupulous social scientist,
is the Smolensk Archive. It is a unique collection. Merle Fainsod
who first used it describes its history:
"In mid-July 1941, less than a month after Hitler
launched his invasion of the Soviet Union, German
army units swept into the city of Smolensk. The local
authorities were presumably under instructions to
destroy or withdraw their records, but in the general
confusion of the evacuation, arrangements went astray.
At Party headquarters in Smolensk, where current files
were kept, Party officials apparently managed to burn
or remove all important documents; at least none of
any real significance was found for the period 1939-
1941. The back files, however, covering the period
1917-1938 were stored in another building far from
Party headquarters and these remained largely intact.
German intelligence officers, who discovered the collec-
tion, found it in a state of great disarray and made a
rather random selection of more than 500 files containing
approximately 200,000 pages of documents which were
snipped back to Germany for examination. There at
the end of the war they fell into American hands." 30
The American authorities made no attempt to return the
documents to their rightful owners after the war. Acting on the
principle that "finding is keeping"', the records became the
property of the Departmental Records Branch, Office of the
Adjutant General of the United States Army. This archive is a
collection of Communist Party records from the Western Region
in Byelorussia from before 1917 till 1939. It contains the files of
the Party organizations from the local city cells to the regional
committee. They include membership files, minutes of meetings,
letters to and from Moscow, orders and documents from
Moscow. Merle Fainsod had access to the Archive for the
material for his book, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule. He was a
product of the same Russian Research Centre at Harvard as
Brzezinski and had already established a reputation in the field of
Soviet studies with his work, How Russia is Ruled, in 1953.
Unfortunately Fainsod ruined this opportunity to analyze the
almost weekly workings of the Communist Party because he was
unable to break out of the Cold War mould. In his introduction
he described his conceptualization of the Communist Party to
which the new data was added. "In the political sphere", he
wrote, "Stalinism spelled the development of a full-blown
totalitarian regime in which all the lines of control ultimately
converged in the hands of the supreme dictator. The Party
83
became a creature of Stalin's will ... Its role was reduced to that
of a transmission belt, which Stalin used to communicate his
directives, to mobilize support for them by propaganda and
agitation, and to check on their execution. As the purges of the
mid-thirties approached their apogee, terror itself became a
system of power, and the secret police flourished and multiplied.
The fear which its agents inspired provided the foundation of
Stalin's own security; through them he guarded the loyalty of the
Party, the armed forces, the bureaucracy, the intellectuals, and
the mass of the population generally." 31 It made a nonsense of
the very notion of research to start from such a baseline. Not
surprisingly Fainsod's work created the impression that the
Smolensk Archive merely confirmed the widely publicized
stereotype. Instead of consulting the Archive, Western Soviet-
ologists since 1958 simply quoted from Smolensk Under Soviet
Rule.
This pattern was altered by j Arch Getty. In 1979 Getty was
awarded a doctorate for a dissertation at Boston College in the
US on The 'Great Purges' Reconsidered: The Soviet Communist
Party 1933-1939. The dissertation was published in 1985 under
the title Origins of the Great Purges. The Soviet Communist Party
reconsidered, 1933- 1 938. Getty's research was based on an
analysis of the Smolensk Archive. Using the same data as Fainsod
he contradicted him on every major point. In addition he
produced evidence to challenge the presuppositions and conclu-
sions of Brzezinski and Conquest about the scale and character of
repression, the totalitarian nature of the Soviet state, the
operation of the Communist Party and culpibility of Stalin as the
prime architect. Getty entered the fray as a historian. He was not
a marxist. Although he pointed to the need to examine the Soviet
state, the Communist Party and Stalin in the context of social
forces he did not do that himself but confined his analysis to the
main variables which the Smolensk Archive revealed. He
produced contentious conclusions such as that the Soviet adminis-
tration was not totalitarian but chaotic, clumsy and inefficient,
that democratic centralism in the Communist Party did not work
so that the centre did not control the periphery of the Party and
that within the leadership there were factions and arguments,
with Stalin often playing a moderating role. But more important
for subsequent researchers he clarified the periods, the issues and
the events in a way which will encourage them to discard the
predominant Western preconception about Stalinism.
84
Similar work of reappraisal has been undertaken in Britain at
the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the
University of Birmingham. There S G Wheatcroft, as part of a
research project concerning "Soviet economic balances and
trends 1929-1941", has reassessed the statistics of the purges with
the same kind of objectivity as Getty. He approached the issue by
critically examining the assumptions underlying the calculations
made by Conquest and others and found that they had little basis
in reality. So distorted were the assumptions that the calculation
of the pre-war penal population derived from them would have
meant that nearly one-fifth of all Soviet adult males were
imprisoned. Even the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the
US Department of State concluded that "So disastrous would
have been the demographic and economic consequences of such a
situation that its existence seems to have been highly
improbable." 32 Wheatcroft 's own conclusions, published in pap-
ers in the Journal Soviet Studies, volumes XXXIII and XXXV for
1981 and 1983, arc that "the quantitative significance of the 1937-
38 purge has generally been exaggerated" and that in particular
Conquest's "estimates are erroneous or unreliable". These are
rather generous comments about the work of earlier Sovietolo-
gists. The American sociologist, Albert Szymanski, who com-
mented on the work of Brzezinski and Conquest came to the
political conclusion that "Even though dealing with events of half
a century ago, they serve to discredit future possibilities of
socialist revolution in other countries, which is why the issue
continues to receive such attention." 33 "The exaggerators", he
added, "are rewarded with grants, publications, high positions
and personal support in proportion to the outrageousness of the
figures they generate".
The events between 1933 and 1939 comprised three distinct
phenomena. There was, first, the "purging" of members from the
Communist Party; second, an anti-bureaucratic campaign aimed
particularly at the middle layers of the Party and government
authority and third, a paranoia about attempts to destabilize the
country and stage a military coup d'etat in alliance with Nazi
Germany and Japan. 34 The three phenomena overlapped in time
but they were never confused by Soviet people. Contemporary
Western attention was concentrated mainly on the public trials of
leading politicians and military officers accused of treason, with
some embellishments from the anti-bureaucracy campaign.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union periodically
85
screened its membership in order to eliminate undesirable
elements and to maintain its integrity as a cadre party. After the
Bolsheviks assumed power, membership of the Party held
attractions for different reasons, some of which had nothing to do
with socialism. Some people saw membership as a means to
individual advancement. On some occasions the Party growth
distorted its purpose in that it failed to reflect the occupational,
ethnic or sex balance of the society at large. It had, for example,
too few workers or women. Whatever the reasons the distortions
in the Party were rectified through a chistka, translated into
English as a purge but with a much softer meaning in Russian.
Chistka is derived from chisteel, the verb to clean.
The first chistka was in 1921. The Communist Party had
increased its membership twenty-seven fold between 1917 and
1921 with a half million "untested, unknown and potentially
unreliable persons". Pravda warned against the "over-filling of
the party" and expressed concern about careerism by the new
members. 35 The Party's reaction was to weed out and expel
between 10% and 15% of its members through a process of re-
registration in 1919. In Russian this was called pereregistratsiia. It
repeated the process in 1921 with both a chistka and a selective
recruitment policy . 36 The main charges against the 25 per cent of
the membership who were expelled were inactivity, careerism.
failure to carry out Party instructions, drunkenness, corruption
practising religion and joining the Party with counter-
revolutionary intentions. One-third of the white-collar workers
were expelled, compared with one-sixth of the manual workers
and two-fifths of the peasants. Although there were important
political divisions in the Party in 1921 no recognizable opposition-
ists were expelled.
As well as pereregistratsiia and chistka the Communist Party
carried out proverka which involved the verification of member-
ship cards and also resulted in expulsions. In 1928 the member-
ship was "screened" in seven Party regions resulting in 13 per cent
of their members being expelled. The following year there was a
chistka with an expulsion rate of 11 per cent, amounting to
170,000 members. On each occasion expelled members had the
right of appeal. In 1929, 37,000 people were re-instated, reducing
the expulsion rate to 8 per cent. 37 Each time the membership was
reviewed in response to special circumstances. Following the
introduction of the First Five Year Plan and the collectivization of
agriculture in 1929 there was strong pressure on workers to join
S6
the Party, identify with the new policies and supervise their
application. Almost one million new members were enrolled in
1931. Recruitment was eased off in 1932 and halted at the
beginning of 1933. But by then the membership of the Party had
increased by 131 .6 per cent since 1929. This fact alone gave rise to
concern about the state of the Party. At the same time as
recruitment was suspended the Central Committee decided to
conduct another chistka. A special Central Purge Commission
was formed at the head of a hierarchy of ad hoc commissions at
all levels of the Party. At the point where the credentials of the
members were actually examined were the regional committees,
comprised of communists of at least 10 years' standing. Eighteen
per cent of the membership was expelled for moral corruption,
careerism, violating party discipline, passivity, for hiding their
social background and for acting as bureaucrats. 38
These Soviet purges were not aimed at political dissent. When,
for instance, a verification of Communist Party cards was held in
1935 the Smolensk City Communist Party Committee warned, in
line with the Regional Committee, "That secretaries of the raion
committees and leaders of party organizations must not transform
the work of verifying party documents into a campaign of
unmasking, but rather must ensure, by conducting the necessary
rganizational measures and by improving methods of party
work, a constant increase in party awareness, a raising of integrity
the struggle to strengthen the ranks of party organizations
." 39 This was a far cry from the manner in which the purges
-c interpreted in the West where the expulsion of members was
med to be part of a pattern of violence, arrests, prosecutions,
s and executions. Purges were such a systematic organizational
tice in the Soviet Union that books and articles were
lished on the theme advising how to conduct one in such a
y as to strengthen rather than weaken the Party.
The second phenomenon which Western sovietologists lumped
with the chistka to discredit the Soviet Union was the anti-
bureaucratic campaign which eventually decimated the lower and
middle levels of the Party. This was unrelated to the chistka
except that in the process of checking Party members an
awareness of the obstruetiveness and inefficiency of the regional
party organizations began to spread. Criticisms of the Party were
made both formally within the Party and publicly in the media. In
November, 1933 the Central Committee ordered local organiza-
tions to be more efficient in keeping membership records. Then
87
at the seventeenth Party Congress early in 1934 a member of the
Central Purge Commission, Ian Rudzutak, spoke of chaos in
membership accounting. No one, he and others claimed, knew
who was in the Party and who was not. 40 The outcome was a
Central Committee decision in October 1934 to conduct a general
registration of membership, known as the proverka or Verification
of Party Documents, the following year.
A variety of factors concerning the character of the Soviet
Communist Party began to coalesce from 1935 in a manner no-
one could have predicted and with wholly unexpected con-
sequences. The proverka, a serious matter from the point of view
of the Central Committee, was bungled by the inertia of regional
secretaries to whom the task had been entrusted. Where they did
not ignore the proverka they passed on the job of interviewing
each of their members to their subordinates who in turn gave it
little attention. The Central Committee became dissatisfied with
the bureaucratic manner in which the operation was handled
though it also had misgivings about disorders in the membership
accounting system. It was stated, for example that: "Leaders did
not know their members; glaring discrepancies existed between
records and real membership; party cards had been given out
wholesale; genuine members did not have cards at all; and
expelled persons had kept their membership cards . . . Party
cards of dead persons were being used by relations, spies, White
Guard, Trotskyists, and various alien elements." 41
A twist was given to the proverka by the reaction to Kirov's
assassination in December, 1934. The Central Committee,
believing that it was the work of Trotskyist groups, ordered local
Party organizations to search out their Trotskyist members. The
task of "unmasking" became appended to the proverka though by
coincidence rather than design. This did not visibly affect the
results but introduced an air of scepticism, suspicion and criticism
which affected the relations between party organs and members
and between members themselves.
Through its dissatisfaction with the proverka the Central
Committee ordered a second Verification of Party Documents
from July. 1935. This time it publicized its criticisms, named some
of the officials involved and called on the rank and file to
participation through a series of local meetings. Communists
were encouraged to engage in open criticisms of each other and of
the local Party functionaries. In effect the central leadership
appealed to the ordinary members to tackle the deficiencies at
regional and local level. The attention of the Party was directed
more and more to its bureaucratic middle. The expelled members
during the chistka had been mainly rank and filers without any
formal positions but during 1935 lower-level office-bearers were
expelled. As each stage unfolded the locus of the criticisms
moved closer to the middle and upper level power-holders.
Altogether, nine per cent of the membership was expelled
during the proverka. Thus between the beginning of the 1933
chistka and the end of the first proverka in May 1935, about
613,000 members were expelled. There were three grades of
membership: full member, candidate member and sympathiser.
During that period, however, 1.3 million people left the Party
which meant that 469,000 simply failed to appear before the Party
organizations to account for their membership and, therefore,
voluntarily left the Party. The most important single reasons for
the fall in Party membership were clearly apathy amongst
members and incompetence on the party organs to keep track of
their members. 42
The proverka was followed by an Exchange of Party Docu-
ments in 1936 and this completed the analysis of the Party
membership. This last stage was necessary, it was stated, because
many Party cards needed to be replaced in order to reconsider
questionable cases of Party membership and to provide those
expelled or censured with the possibility of reinstatement. The
instructions for conducting the Exchange were meticulous and
based on "sound accounting procedures and careful regulation of
membership cards" 43 The Central Committee added that "in the
exchange, they must turn their principal attention toward freeing
themselves of passive party members not deserving the high title
of member of the party; of people who accidently find themselves
in the VKP(b)"* 4 In the period between May, 1935 and
September 1936 about 261,000 Party members were expelled by
their local committees but more than 167,000 of these were
reinstated on appeal.
The anti-bureaucratic pressures came to a head in 1937. They
received increasing encouragement from the central leadership.
As the Exchange of Party Documents was nearing its end, Pravda
reported that there had' been too many hasty, wrongful expul-
sions on insufficient grounds; that lower party organizations had
been far too free in their censures, reprimands and expulsions;
that too much had been decided in closed meetings of Party
committees; that the rules on appeals procedures were not being
89
followed. Expelled members complained to the Central Committee
of wrongful expulsion. Local Party secretaries were criticized for
being too formal, bureaucratic and mechanical. There was
increasing comment about heartless bureaucrats. A circular letter
from the Central Committee on 24 June 1936, stated: "Many
regional party organizations have acted in an intolerably arbitrary
manner with respect to expelled persons. For concealing their
social origins and for passivity, and not because of hostile activity
against the party and the Soviet power, they have been
automatically fired from their jobs, deprived of their apartments,
etc.^ 5
The momentum to condemn bureaucratic officials was height-
ened by events outside the Party. As a reflection of the success of
the First Five Year Plan and the confident feeling that Soviet
society was maturing, the Seventh Congress of Soviets decided in
February, 1935 to bring the 1924 Soviet Constitution up to date.
A Constitutional Commission under the chairmanship of Stalin
was established in July 1935, and, eleven months later, submitted
a new draft Constitution for discussion. 60 million copies of the
Constitution were distributed throughout the country. Public
discussion was widespread and intense. An estimated 527,000
meetings were held, attended by over 36 million people, to
discuss its terms and suggest amendments. Much of the discussion
was about the rights and duties of Soviet citizens for the draft
proposed direct elections for all organs of state power. There was
to be a single franchise for all citizens at 18 years of age, a secret
ballot, candidates were to be nominated by the branches of
working class and peasant organizations, they were required to
have a 50 per cent majority in at least a 50 per cent poll to be
elected, and successful candidates were liable to recall by their
constituents. 46 Altogether 150,000 amendments were submitted
to the Constitutional Commission. The Constitution came into
force in December 1936 and much of 1937 was spent by organiza-
tions in every part of the Soviet Union in preparing for the
elections for which it provided.
A single candidate was nominated for each constituency but
before this happened there was a selection procedure which was
conducted in a variety of ways such as primaries or election
conferences and through which encumbents were criticized and
sometimes rejected. One third of the local and national successful
candidates were elected for the first time in 1937.
A similar process of criticism and selection took place in the
90
Communist Party after the Central Committee had launched its
'•democracy/anti-bureaucracy" campaign in February 1937 to
mobilise rank and file opposition to bureaucratic inertia. The
Communist Partv leadership responded to the mismanagement
revealed by the chistka and proverka. At other levels dissatisfac-
tion about' the conduct of the party was expressed by the new
generation of political activists who had been completely educated
under socialist conditions. These came from working class and
peasant backgrounds but belonged to a new socialist intelligentsia.
They were Impatient with the older, less-educated body of
leaders who had remained relatively unchallenged for most of the
time since the Revolution, who had become fixed in their ways
and, as Pravda commented, thought of their positions as fiefs.
At the February plenum of the Central Committee in 1937
Andrei Zhdanov who had succeeded Kirov as the Leningrad First
Secretary and member of the Politburo, spoke strongly against
bureaucratic methods of leadership and in favour of increased
participation of rank and file members. He proposed direct
elections by secret ballot for the Communist Party. Based on his
speech the' Central Committee ordered the immediate abolition
of cooption to committees, voting by lists instead of individuals
and insisted that secret ballot elections should be held for all
Partv organizations up to the level of oblal or region by 20 May
1937. At the plenum Zhdanov was generally supported by
Stalin. 47 .,
The elections were held in the Spring accompanied by a wide-
spread press campaign with articles headed "Under the banner of
self-criticism and connection to the masses" and dealing with the
issues of self-criticism, democracy, learning from the rank and file
and verifying the leaders. At some meetings of raion or district
committees the denunciations of the officials were so intense that
they were voted out of office before the elections were held.
There was a widespread protest vote. Altogether, 55 per cent of
the committees were voted out of office throughout the country.
In the Leningrad region 48 per cent of the raion committees were
new. In most of the large towns about 20 per cent of the
Secretaries and partv organizers were elected for the first time.
Many of the officials were young worker-Stakhanovites or technical
workers. 48 The elections, however, did not remove the regional
leaderships, even where they had been strongly criticized. For
that to happen the anti-bureaucratic campaign had to be taken
further by the Central Committee.
91
The secretariat of the obkom, the regional committee, was
elected from that committee with the endorsement of the Central
Committee. It was difficult for rank and file protests to maintain
their momentum through to that level. The First Secretary of an
obkom was a powerful person in his own right, usually surrounded
by supporters through patronage and cooption. Take the position
of First Secretary Ivan Petrovitch Runyantsev of the Western
oblat, centred on Smolensk in Byelorussia at that time. His region
had a population of 6.5 million, bigger than some countries. It
encompassed 110 districts each with between 50,000 and 75,000
inhabitants. It included 3 substantial cities. Runyantsev, more-
over, was from 1934, a member of the Central Committee. It
needed more than encouragement to depose him and others like
him. Indeed only four regional secretaries out of the twenty-five
whose regional conferences were reported in the press were
removed by conference decisions in 1937. 49
It was at this point that the anti-bureaucratic campaign merged
at the edges with the third phenomenon, the Ezhovshchina, the
period of mass arrests. Soviet society felt increasingly vulnerable
to attack following the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany and
the widespread preparations for war. It expressed its nervousness
after the Kirov assassination when accusations were made against
the opposition groups led by Trotsky and Zinoviev and a wave of
arrests was initiated. This resulted, however, in relatively few
expulsions from the Party. Zinoviev, Kamenev and thirteen of
their associates were arrested and tried for the assassination but
were found guilty only of moral complicity. The reaction from the
assassination had dissipated by the -middle of 1935 and for a year
there was no evidence of any political arrests. There was a
renewal of the unease from the middle of 1936 when extra-
ordinary powers were given to the political police to counter
'enemies of the people'. The NKVD was authorized to arrest and
sentence non-Party members suspected of counter-revolutionary
activities without trial or right of appeal. This was a recipe for
oppression because people, in their jumpiness, began accusing
each other. The first of the renown "Moscow trials" occurred in
August 1936 when Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen others were
charged again with the Kirov assassination and on this occasion
found guilty.
The second major trial was held when Radek, Piatakov and 15
others were found guilty of 'wrecking^ and economic sabotage in
January 1937. They were alleged to have acted in complicity with
92
German and Japanese intelligence forces. Trotsky was implicated.
There was an understandable fear of war in the Soviet Union. A
classical war set piece was being tried out in Spain by Germany
and Italy following the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July,
1936 with the Soviet Union in opposition on the side of the
Republicans. Hitler had spoken of the attractions to Germany of
the fertile plains of the Ukraine and the raw materials of the
Urals. 50 Then at the end of 1936 Germany and Japan concluded
an 'Anti-Commintern Pact'. The view that an invasion was
imminent spread throughout the country. The search for 'enemies
of the people' began to assume a new and desperate dimension at
all levels of Soviet society.
The trial of the military leaders in 1937 activated the convergence
of many factors which created the period in Soviet history
described as Ezhovshchina. It stemmed from allegations which
came from Germany via Czechoslovakia that the Soviet military
leaders were planning a coup d'etat to coincide with a German-
Japanese invasion. Documents were leaked which linked two
Deputy People's Commissars for Defence, Tukhachevsky and
Gamarnik and a number of generals with the Germans. Marshall
Tukhachevsky, the leading Soviet military expert, and army
commanders covering various regions of the Soviet Union were
arrested in May and tried and executed m June. The regional
army commanders had close links with the Regional Communist
Party Secretaries so suspicion fell on them too. Evidence about
the complicity of the Regional Secretaries is contradictory^ 1 but
there was another reason for indicting them. They had survived
the anti-bureaucratic campaign from the rank and tile members.
Extra-ordinary meetings of the Regional Committees were
convened at which members of the Politburo were present. In
Smolensk, for example, L M Kaganovitch attended an extra-
ordinary plenum of the Western Obkum when the Regional
Secretary and his secretariat were removed from office. G
Malenkov went first to Byelorussia and then with A Mikoyan to
Armenia; L Beria went to Georgia while Molotov, Ezhov and
Khrushchev went to the Ukraine. The removal of the Regional
Secretaries was unpopular only with those who had received
patronage from them. The ordinary members welcomed the
opportunity to unleash their criticisms on those who had been
insulated from them before.
The decision to implicate the Regional Secretaries was clearly
made by Stalin and the Politburo but the consequences which
93
flowed from it were not the result of a disciplined and co-
ordinated approach to repress dissent. Concern about spies, a
fear of war, the attack on bureaucracy and the eagerness of Soviet
workers to criticize generated a paranoia within the Communist
Party at all levels. Members informed against each other for
being enemies of the people and were then informed against
themselves. Some used the occasion to settle old scores. Others
cleared out adversaries or those they mistrusted. The political
police were the weapon of repression. Party members had always
been protected from the arbitrary acts of the NKVD but late in
1937 the NKVD acquired the authority to arrest those in the
Party who had not been subject to Party discipline or expelled.
The NKVD, however, was also the subject of repression. The
Commissar of Internal Relations, G G Iagoda, was removed from
his post in September, 1936, allegedly for laxity in exposing the
Trotksy and Zinoviev group. Later he and many leading officials
of the NKVD were arrested. Tagoda was tried with Bukharin and
Rykov in March 1938. found guilty and executed. The regional
and local officials of the NKVD were caught up in the maelstrom
of political violence and put under pressure to uncover spies,
saboteurs and wreckers. Arrests followed arrests as threads
linked the exposures and confessions. Officials who did not
respond to accusations put themselves under suspicion for
complicity. They arrested many innocent people out of sheer
inefficiency and by the same standard allowed others to get away.
Getty reports that "a person who felt that his arrest was imminent
could go to another town and, as a rule, avoid being seized. 1 ' 52
Yet the NKVD was not seen in the public eye as an oppressor but
as a saviour. There was an Ezhov - NKVD cult in the press.
Many NKVD officials received honours from the state. It was a
complex period, containing many contradictions.
The Ezhovshchina in Perspective
In so far as it is possible to identify the main characteristics of
the Ezhovshchina from the evidence available they have little in
common with the widely projected Western view. There is
genera! agreement that the repression was extensive and painful,
resulting in many personal tragedies and leaving scars on Soviet
society which arc still present. But there the agreement ends. The
repression, in the first instance, did not extend through the years
from 1933 to 1939 but was concentrated into a period of about 7
94
months, from the trial of Marshall Tukhachevsky in June 1937 to
the early part of 1938. There was, of course, a building up stage
and a trailing off period but the Ezhovshchina as described by
Brzezinski and Conquest was of short duration. Secondly it was
neither planned nor in any sense intended. There was in 1937 a
coincidence of circumstances which interacted with and on each
other to produce a collective hysteria about enemies within and
without. The arrest of military leaders arose from allegations of
treason which were never proved or disproved; the anti-
bureaucratic campaign led the central leadership to attack the
middle levels of the Party, some sections of which were associated
with the military leaders; ordinary communists exploited their
new-found freedom to criticize officials and played a pivotal role
in removing and punishing them. The deteriorating international
situation led many people at all levels to believe that the Soviet
Union was going to be invaded with the complicity of Britain and
the USA and generated a nervousness about 'spies 1 and 'wreckers'.
AH of these forces coalesced to produce a national paranoia
through which, Medvedev stated. "Hundreds of thousands of
Communists voted for the expulsion of 'enemies of the people'
(and) millions of ordinary people took part in meetings and
demonstrations demanding severe reprisals against 'enemies'.' 01
The repression had both irrational and rational qualities. It was
irrational in that many unsuspecting and innocent people were
caught up in it. Agents provocateurs were active;otd scores were
settled; false accusations were made; conspiracies were imagined;
accidents became sabotage. "The smallest error of a manager,
miscalculation of an engineer, misprint overlooked by an editor
or proofreader, publication of a bad book, was taken to be
deliberate wrecking and cause for arrest. People looked every-
where for secret signs or fascist symbols, and found them in
drawings in books, in note-books, in scout badges. Even such
difficulties as the low pay of teachers, shortages of funds, high
drop-out rates from high school, the wearing out of equipment,
were demagogically attributed to sabotage." 5
At the same time there was an element of rationality about it.
For many people the Ezhovshchina had a definite and legitimate
purpose/ The rank and file members of the Party defined their
adversaries as those with authority over them and these suffered
the greatest toll. The main casualties were the elite of Soviet
society, the administrative and managerial personnel, army
officers, party functionaries and intellectuals. Ordinary Party
95
members were relatively untouched by the Ezhovshchina. 55
Many, indeed, benefited from its consequences. Numberless
vacancies were created in every field of public activity. "In the
five years from 1933 to 1938", Isaac Deutschcr commented,
"about half a million administrators, technicians, economists, and
men of other professions had graduated from the high
schools . . . This was the new intelligentsia whose ranks filled the
purged and emptied offices. Its members . . . were either hostile
to the men of the old guard or indifferent to their fate. They
threw themselves into their work with a zeal and enthusiasm
undimmed by recent events . . . ,,,5S Hundreds of thousands of
skilled men and women whose paths had been blocked by the
rigid bureaucracy of the middle layers suddenly found welcoming
avenues opening for them. Stakhanovite workers became factory
directors; rank and file scientists took over research institutes
while ordinary soldiers moved rapidly up the military hierarchy.
Ironically, the repression which created so many gaps in the
decision-making processes generated a sense of solidarity which
was reflected in the commitment with which the new cadres
approached their tasks. It created a mobility within the Communist
Party which had rejuvinating effects and served it well during the
critical years of the war.
An examination of the membership changes in the Communist
Party during 1937 confirms that the Ezhovshchina was not
directed at ordinary members. There was not a mass expulsion of
.members. Indeed the rate of expulsions fell after the 1933 chistka
and reached its lowest level in 1937. The number of members
expelled during the whole of 1937 was less than 100,000,
amounting to about 5 per cent of the total membership. >7 This
was little more than half of those expelled in the 1935 proverka
and one eighth of the number expelled in the 1933 chistka. The
statistics for the Moscow Party which suffered inordinately from
the repression show a similar picture. There, 33,000 members
were expelled in 1937 compared with 45,500 in 1935 and 133,000
in 1933. 58 Moreover, although Party members suffered most
during the Ezhovshchina, the Party itself was not tarnished by it.
Recruitment to the Party was suspended in January, 1933 for
almost 4 years. It was the longest moratorium on recruitment in
the history of the Party. The moratorium was eased at the end of
1936 and gradually lifted during 1937. Recruitment took place on
an increasing scale during the Ezhovshchina. There was little sign
of any reluctance by people to join the Party though local
96
branches proceeded cautiously by carefully vetting applicants.
The "number of new candidates rose from 12,000 in the eight
months November 1936 to June 1937, to 28,000 in the second half
of 1937, to 109,000 in the first half of 1938, and in the second half
of that year apparently totalled over 400,000. This acceleration
continued after the Eighteenth Congress in March 1939, and the
party grew by the record number of 1 ,100,000 in that year". 59 If
mass arrests and executions had been associated with Communist
Party membership as Brzezinski and Conquest assert, then the
eagerness of the young non-members to belong to the Party
would be inexplicable except as a desire for self-destruction.
In conclusion, the Ezhovshchina was not by itself or in
conjunction with the expulsions from the Communist Party
during the previous four years, including the 'Great Trials', either
Stalin's Purge or a reign of terror imposed by a totalitarian system
to stamp out dissent and annihilate all possible contenders for
Stalin's leadership position. What happened resulted from social
forces and not evil machinations of individuals or, as Medvedev
contends, of one individual. Many 'Old Bolsheviks' who had
served with Stalin during the Revolution suffered from the
repression. But they as persons were not the targets of the
repression. They suffered because the targets of the anti-
bureaucratic bias during the Ezhovshchina were office-holders,
many of whom were communists who had joined the Party before
1917. "Old Bolsheviks fell". Getty maintained "because of their
leadership positions in 1937, not because of their age or past
experience." 61 * He believed that "It is not inconsistent with the
evidence to argue that the Ezhovshchina was rather a radical,
even hysterical, reaction to bureaucracy. The entrenched office
holders were destroyed from above and below in a chaotic wave
of voluntarism and revolutionary puritanism". 61
Stalin's part in this process was undoubtedly important though
it was by no means as crucial as the Western obsession with the
cult of the personality suggests. He worked within social forces
which he did not and could not control but even at the
institutional level of activity he moved between alternative
courses of action advocated by other members of the Politburo,
between Molotov who urged rapid industrialization and Serge
Ordzhonikidze who believed in cautious development, between
Ezhov who acted through repression and Andrei Zhdanov who
saw the solution to the Communist Party's problems in terms of
political education and propaganda. During the course of the
97
1930s he moved from a moderate to a radical stance but he
frequently had to find a balance between competing forces. It is a
malevolent distortion to portray the Politburo as his plaything as
did Adam Ulam, yet another product of the Russian Research
Centre at Harvard University. Ulam wrote that from 1936 "the
Politburo's function even as an advisory organ was challenged", 62
in support of his contention that Stalin masterminded "an
incredible plan of repression and terror", had "a thirst for blood",
pushed his scheme "to the border of madness" 63 The Politburo,'
Ulam insisted, was comprised of "half-men, who even in their
criminality were pale imitations of their leader." 64 But as Getty
observed, Stalin could not control everything that happened in
the Party and country. "The number of hours in the day, divided
by the number of things for which he was responsible, suggests
that his role in many areas could have been little more than
occasional intervention, prodding, threatening, or correcting. In
the course of a day t Stalin made decisions on everything from hog
breeding to subways to national defense. He met with scores of
experts, heard dozens of reports, and settled various disputes
between contending factions for budgetary or personnel allocations.
He was an executive, and reality forced him to delegate most
authority to his subordinates, each of whom had his own opinions,
client groups, and interests." 65 His political subordinates were
powerful in their own right, representing interests and reflecting
social forces.
Stalin, the Politburo and the Central Committee of the
Communist Party were responsible for the Ezhovshchina in that
the state agencies through which it was mediated and applied
were under their direction. Through this they were guilty of
falling to identify and reverse negative forces. They were, in fact,
carried along by those forces and, in this sense were guilty of
complicity at least. There is no doubt that their responses both
facilitated and legitimized the repression. The Politburo, including
Stalin, however, took a hard line over the alleged treachery of the
military and favoured both the trial and the sentences it
produced. Both he and members of the Politburo regarded the
extension of the anti-bureaucratic campaign to Regional Secre-
tariats as prophylactic and assisted in their removal. Stalin
presumably endorsed making the link between regional military
commanders and Regional Party Secretaries which resulted in the
arrest of many of them. But what neither he nor members of the
Politburo did was to plan the interaction of the various elements
^8
which resulted in the Ezhovshchina. Indeed as no one could have
foreseen the outcome of that interaction such a plan was
inconceivable. Getty, giving a more cautious estimate, stated that
his study "more than once failed to conclude that the events were
part of a coherent plan . . . Careful analysis of archival,
documentary, press, creditable memoir sources neither supports
nor disproves the existence of a plan . . . the evidence indicates
that a master Stalin plan must remain an a priori assumption, an
intuitive guess, or a hypothesis." 66
The precise policies which Stalin supported in the Politburo are
not known. The main indicators of his views are his public
statements. Speeches by the General Secretary of the Communist
Party were an important means for communicating policies. They
were not instruments for persuasion in order to raise the poll
ratings. They usually simply informed people about Politburo and
Central Committee deliberations. Insofar as they dealt with
controversial issues they reflected Stalin's approach to them. It is
significant then that mostly in public Stalin sided with Andrei
Zhdanov's view that only political measures could solve the
Party's problems. He quickly became concerned about the turn
Ezhovshchina had taken. In little over six months after the June
trial of Marshall Tukhachevsky there were signs that the
Ezhovshchina was beginning to end. The Central Committee in
January 1938 roundly turned on Party officials who had abused
their power through their heartless and bureaucratic attitude
towards communists accused of being enemies of the people. It
did not criticize the political police though the rate of arrests fell
sharply, Jn the Party the number of expulsions declined, expelled
members began to be rehabilitated and the new recruitment
campaign was set in motion. The trial of Bukharin, Rykov and
Iagod was held in March, 1938 but the defendants had been in
custody for just over a year and the trial attracted little publicity.
Some arrests continued to be made during 1938 but at the end of
the year Ezhovshchina ended completely. Ezhov was relieved of
his duties on 8 December at his own request, disappeared from
the public eye and was executed. The convictions of former
enemies of the people began to be reversed. The NKVD came
under attack and a number of its officials were dismissed and
arrested for criminal actions. When the Party Congress met in
March 1939 the events of the past 3 years were strongly criticized
both by Stalin and Zhdanov. The Party rules were changed to
strengthen a member's right of appeal against expulsion and to
99
ban the practice of purging the membership. Many thousands of
expelled numbers returned to the Party and their jobs. Amongst
them were army officers who on the eve of the war, and in its
early stages, took up their commands again.
The Dissidents
In the 1950s and 1960s the events of the 1930s were at the
centre of the Western debate about the Soviet Union but now
they are the backcloth for other criticisms of the communist
system. The focus of Western attention nowadays has been
turned to the question of human rights, by which is meant the
right to engage in political criticism of the Soviet system and to
organize opposition to it, on the one hand, and the right as an
individual to emigrate, on the other hand. Two distinct issues are
involved here and they are treated separately. The right to
emigrate was raised in Chapter Four and is examined in the
following chapter "The Jewish Question". In some circumstances
there is overlap where Soviet Jews, in order to further their own
specific aims, engage in dissenting action. The dissidents,
however, can be examined without the complications of Zionism
and anti-Semitism which the Jewish issue raises.
In the Soviet Union citizens are protected from arbitrary arrest
by Article 3 of the 1960 Code which provides that no persons can
be punished unless they have committed a crime provided for by
law. Dissenters, however, can be punished by infringing Articles
70, 190-1 and 190-3 of the Criminal Code, which are designed to
protect the Soviet social system from subversion. Article 70
penalizes "agitation or propaganda carried on for the purpose of
subverting or weakening the Soviet regime or of committing
particular, especially dangerous crimes against the state, or the
circulation, for the same purpose, of slanderous fabrication which
defame the Soviet state and social system or the circulation or
preparation or keeping, for the same purposes, of literature of
such content" 67 Article 190-1 covers acts which constitute a
slander of the Soviet state but which do not involve a subversive
intent. Article 190-3 introduced in 1966, is directed against group
demonstrations and makes punishable "organization of, and
likewise, action participation in, group actions which violate
public order in a coarse manner", or "clear disobedience of the
legal demands of representatives of authority."
The scope of the Articles is wide, enabling almost any form of
100
objectionable political activity to fall within their terms. Their
application, however, has been strongly influenced by the constant
attempts by capitalist countries to isolate and undermine the
Soviet Union with the intention of destroying its basis. In this
process the experience of the German invasion in 1941 with its
devastating effect upon the lives and property of Soviet people
has had an indelible effect. Nothing can be understood about
Soviet reactions to criticisms and threats, no matter how
insignificant they might seem from the outside, without taking
their war experiences into account. It is unlikely that they will
ever be erased from the collective Soviet memory. Whilst the
wounds from the war were healing and the damage to property
was being repaired the Cold War began which, with variations in
intensity, has never ceased. It would be surprising under the
circumstances if the Soviet Union were not sensitive to criticisms.
In terms of their actual operation, the Articles differ little from
the catch-all Public Order Acts in Western countries. If the law
enforcement authorities in Britain want to suppress dissent there
is legislation on hand suitable for all occasions. The British
authorities could cover all the contingencies in the Soviet Articles
without introducing new legislation. The British police had no
difficulty in arresting 10,000 coal miners during the 1984-5
Miners' Strike for simple public order offences even though many
of them were engaged in a variety of acts of political dissent.
Legislation does not have to be specifically directed at dissent, as
in the Soviet Union, in order to curb it.
Those who are arrested under the Soviet Articles 70, 190-1 and
190-3 are described in the West as political offenders and those
who are in consequence imprisoned are termed political prisoners.
The status of dissidents, however, is controversial. Those same
people have broken the law and are regarded by the Soviet
authorities as criminal offenders. The dilemma is common to
many countries. Every terrorist is someone's freedom fighter. In
Northern Ireland, Republican supporters regard those Republicans
arrested for terrorist offences as political offenders and there has
been a long struggle there to obtain the status of political
prisoners for the ones who are imprisoned. From the 1972 hunger
strike by the Republican prisoner, Billy McKee, a classification of
political prisoners, called Special Category prisoners, was recog-
nized in Northern Ireland. These prisoners were identified by the
special concessions they received. There were approximately
2000 Republican and 800 Loyalist or Protestant Special Category
101
prisoners by 1976, out of a population in Northern Ireland of W 2
million. The British government abolished the Category in
March, 1976 so that it was no longer possible to identify political
prisoners. But they remained and started the 'blanket protest'
from September, 1976. for the restoration of their political status.
As many as 300 Republican prisoners, by 1978, were refusing to
wear prison clothes and do prison work on the grounds that they
were not criminals. Many Irish Catholics also regard the British
Prevention of Terrorism Act as a means of political repression
and define the 6,155 people who have been detained under it
during the last 12 years as its victims and not as criminals. Yet the
British government literally describes those who have been
convicted as terrorists, murderers and criminals. Many British
coal miners regard those who were imprisoned during the Strike
as victims of political repression just as the dismissed printers
from News International in London regarded the imprisonment
of one of their leaders, Mike Hicks, for alleged assault on a picket
line in 1986 as a political act. Quite clearly the Western pre-
occupation with Soviet dissidents as victims of political repression
contains an clement of hypocracy .
Although the Western media was always willing to publish
details of what it considered to be Soviet violations of human
rights its interest was stimulated by the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky
and Yury Daniel in February, 1966 and a new emphasis began.
The two authors were accused under Article 70 of maligning and
slandering the Soviet state in works published abroad. Before
their trial, on 5 December. 1965, a group of intellectuals
demonstrated in Pushkin Square, Moscow with slogans which
stated: "Respect the Constitution, the Basic Law of the
U.S.S.R." and "We demand that the Sinyavsky - Daniel Trial be
Public '. Sinyavsky and Daniel were found guilty and sent to
labour camps for seven and five years respectively. There was a
chain reaction. The demonstrations led to further arrests and
trials which then led to more demonstations and so it went on.
The writer Alexander Ginzburg wrote a "White Book" account
of the Sinyavsky - Daniel trial in a self-published or samizdat
form. For this he was arrested on 23 January, 1967. So too was
Yuri Galenskov for producing a samizdat almanac Phoenix 1966,
The day before Ginzberg's arrest a group of about 30 people
demonstrated in Moscow against the arrest of Galenskov. Two of
the demonstrators, Victor Khaustov and Vladimir Bukovsky, a
writer, were arrested and sent to labour camps. The trial of the
102
demonstrators was recorded in another "White Book" by a
physicist, Pavel Litvinov, who was exiled in south-east Siberia.
Samizdat material began to multiply in 1968 and a Chronicle of
Current Events was published in samizdat form from April of that
year which provided a catalogue of the activities of the dissenting
intellectuals and the reactions of the authorities. The events in
Czechoslovakia in 1968 both acted as a stimulus to dissent and
provoked a stern official response. It was as if dissenters and
authorities were both on a treadmill. It moved remorselessly
through the 1970s taking with it people, like Vladimir Bukovsky,
who had been on it more than once.
The samizdat. typed by the author or a friend, handed around
informally, usually reached the West where it was published in an
emigre publishing house in Russian or in translation, and often
broadcast back to the Soviet Union by Western radio stations.
Radio Liberty in Munich, West Germany, which is financed by
the US government, has a research staff which specializes in
samizdat material and collects and stores it in a Samizdat
Archive. It began its collection in the late 1960s but since 1972 the
processed contents of the Archive have been available at four
American and four European repository libraries, including the
Library of Congress in Washington, D C. and the British
Museum in London. One Western compiler of samizdat esti-
mated that between 1967 and 1971 about 700 documents, articles,
stories, plays and books had reached the West. 68 Books about
Soviet dissent and containing samizdat articles began to appear
on Western library shelves. In effect Soviet dissidence became a
highly organized business in the West. It had its specialists,
regular channels of communication and sources of finance.
Doubtless, given the priorities of capitalism, it generated profits
too. Some dissidents, in consequence, became household names
and very rich at the same time. Many in the West who have never
heard of a protesting British or American intellectual know the
names of Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev, Shcharansky, Bukovsky and
Sakharov. A letter from Solzhcnistyn to the fourth Soviet
Congress of Writers in 1967 protesting against censorship became
an international document. The same treatment was accorded to
almost any letter written by the physicist, Andrei Sakharov, but
in particular to his open letters to the Supreme Soviet in 1971 and
to the US Congress in 1973.
The issue of Soviet dissidents was heightened by the Israeli
campaign to gain exit for Soviet Jews after the Six Day War in
103
1967. Those Jews who organized protests or who wrote samizdat
documents were arrested and brought to trial under Article 70 in
the same way as non-Jews. The process of arrest followed by
demonstration followed by arrest was repeated for the Jewish
advocats of free emigration, A group of Soviet Jews tried to
hijack a plane and fly it to Sweden in 1970. They were accused of
treason. Two were sentenced to death but their sentences were
later commuted to fifteen years' imprisonment. After the
sentences were announced, a group of British Jews protested
outside the Soviet Embassy in London. In this way Western
Jewry became involved in the campaign about Soviet dissidents
though their concern was always primarily with the right of Soviet
Jews to emigrate. In February 1971 a trial of protesting Jews was
held in Leningrad; then in May, a third one took place in Riga,
the capital of Latvia. The trials, and the demonstrations, fed on
each other.
Western organizations, in the main, did not differentiate
between dissenting Jew r s and non-Jews. The International Pen
Club, the American Academy of Arts and Science and Amnesty
International generated an interest in the West of dissidents in
general. Amnesty International, in particular, systematically
collected and disseminated data about imprisoned dissidents as
"prisoners of conscience". It published a report in 1975 on
Prisoners of Conscience in the USSR: Their Treatment and Condi-
tions, which it updated in 1980. It also published an English tran-
slation of the journal, A Chronicle of Current Events, up to 1975.
Until the election of Jimmy Carter as President of the USA,
the American government was not directly involved in the issue
concerning Soviet dissidents. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
adopted what Zbignicw Brzezinski called a "stance of moral
indifference" towards dissidents which, Brzezinski claimed, was
reflected in Kissinger's advice to Nixon not to receive the exiled
Soviet writer Solzhenitsyn/ 19 Given the consequences of US
involvement in Vietnam, Cambodia and Chile it would indeed
have been highly hypocritical if President Nixon had chastized the
Soviet Union. There were pressures in Congress on Nixon,
however, to take up the cause of Soviet Jewish dissidents. In 1972
a United States Trade Reform Act was passed which embodied
the Soviet/American Trade Agreement and opened up the
possibility of greatly increased trade between the USA and the
Soviet Union. The National Conference on Soviet Jewry had
opened a Washington office late in 1972 through which it lobbied
104
American Senators and Congressmen to insert a human rights
clause in the Act. The result of the lobbying was the Jackson
Amendment which made trade concessions subject to the Soviet
"respect for the right to emigrate". This was followed by the
Arms Control Export Act of 1976 and the Harkin Amendment
which placed significant restrictions on military and economic
assistance to countries which displayed a "consistent pattern of
gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. " This
was the period of detente when the relationship between the
USA and the Soviet Union was closer than at any time since the
war. The influence of the American Jewish lobby, however,
carried the dissident question into the realm of American
government. In 1975 the US government had signed the Final Act
of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, along
with the Soviet Union and 33 European nations, which focussed
international attention on the issues raised by Soviet Jewish
dissidents. Thus when Jimmy Carter became President in January
1977 the American political mood was ready to respond to his
'human rights' appeals.
The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe which
had been convened in Helsinki on 3 July 1973, continued in
Geneva and was concluded at Helsinki on 1 August, 1975. It was
signed by President Ford, who had taken over from the
impeached Richard Nixon, President Brezhnev and Harold
Wilson along with other Heads of State. The Agreement had
much to say about human rights and freedoms. The context was
a recognition of sovereignty. It was accepted by the signatories
that they "will . . . respect each other's right to freely choose and
develop its political, social, economic and cultural systems as well
as its right to determine its laws and regulations."
Principle VII then stated:
'The Participating States will respect human rights and
fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of
thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without
distinction as to race, sex, language or religion. They
will promote and encourage the effective exercise of
civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other
rights and freedoms all of which derive from the
inherent dignity of the human person and are essential
for his free and full development.
Within this famework the participating States will
105
recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to
profess and practise, alone or in community with
others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the
dictates of his own conscience.
The participating States on whose territory national
minorities exist will respect the right of persons
belonging to such minorities to equality before the law,
will afford them the full opportunity for the actual
enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms
and will, in this manner, protect their legitimate
interests in this sphere.
The participatory States recognize the univeral signifi-
cance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
respect for which is an essential factor for the peace,
justice and well-being necessary to ensure the develop-
ment of friendly relations and co-operation among
themselves as among all States.
They will constantly respect these rights and freedoms
in their mutual relations and will endeavour jointly and
separately, including in co-operation with the United
Nations, to promote universal and effective respect for
them.
They confirm the right of the individual to know and
act upon his rights and duties in this field ..."
The Declaration enumerated ways in which co-operation
;tween the States could be facilitated and, under the heading of
uman Contacts, stated
*'(a) Contacts and Regular Meetings on the basis of
Family Ties
In order to promote further development of contacts
on the basis of family ties the participating States will
favourably consider applications for travel with the
purpose of allowing persons to enter or leave their
territory temporarily, and on a regular basis if desired,
in order to visit members of their families . . ,'"
"(b) Re-unification of Families
The participating States will deal in a positive and
humanitarian spirit with the applications of persons
who wish to be reunited with members of their family.
106
with special attention being given to requests of an
urgent character - such as requests submitted by
persons who are ill or old ..."
It was possible for the various countries to sign the Helsinki
Declaration in good faith because each attached its own meaning
to the words. In the case of socialist and capitalist countries this
meant using contrasting values so that even the very words
democracy, individual, freedom and human rights were essentially
interpreted differently. There was, then, bound to be conflicting
evidence when the achievements of the Declaration were
assessed. Nonetheless the immediate consequence in the Soviet
Union was an acceleration of the rate of emigration of Jews. The
number of Soviet Jews who emigrated rose from 13,363 in 1975 to
51,320 in 1979. From May, 1976, five unofficial groups were
formed in Moscow, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and
Armenia to monitor the application of the Helsinki Final Act.
They had a total of about 50 members by 1979, 71 some of whom
were harassed by the authorities and then arrested as dissidents.
Among the members of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group
who were arrested were Yury Orlov and Anatoly Shcharansky.
From the point of view of bourgeois liberal opinion in the West
this situation was unsatisfactory and the agitation against the
Soviet Union intensified. Orlov and Shcharansky became widely
known in Britain and the USA. By this time, 1978, President
Carter was at the front of the human rights campaign.
There is no question that President Carter became a leading
protagonist of human rights all over the world because of his own
strongly held humanitarian views. His administration, however,
elevated the issue of human rights as a prime goal of American
policy in order to cleanse America's tarnished image after
Vietnam and the Nixon affair and not for humanitarian reasons.
This was made clear by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carters anti-
communist, anti-Soviet Assistant for National Security Affairs.
Brzezinski wrote in his autobiographical account of his work with
Carter that:
"Jimmy Carter took office sensing clearly a pressing
need to re-invigorate the moral content of American
foreign policy. After an almost unending series of
revelations about the abuse of governmental power at
home and abroad, the American people were dissatisfied
with their government. In international affairs, there
107
seemed to be a moral vacuum, The Carter Administra-
tion resolved to make a break with the recent past, to
bring the conduct of foreign affairs into line with the
nation's political values and ideals, and to revitalize an
American image which had been tarnished by the
Vietnam experience.
I had long been convinced that the idea of basic human
right had powerful appeal in the emerging world of
emancipated but usually non-democratic nation-states
and that the previous Administration's lack of attention
to this issue had undermined international support for
the United States ... I felt strongly that a major
emphasis on human rights as a component of US
foreign policy would advance America's global in-
terests by demonstrating to the emerging nations of the
Third World of the reality of our democratic system, in
sharp contrast to the political system and practices of
our adversaries. The best way to answer the Soviets'
ideological challenge would be to commit the United
States to a concept which most reflected America's very
essence.'* 72
The question of human rights was raised in Jimmy Carters
speeches both when he was a candidate and President. His
inaugural speech, in words wTitten by Brzezinski, stated "because
we arc free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom
elsewhere . . . our commitment to human rights must be abso-
lute". Thcn T with Carter's approval, Brzezinski established what
was called a "Global Issues Cluster" on the National Security
Staff to deal with human rights issues and thus institutionalized
their projection by the US government. This ensured that
memoranda on human rights would be produced and that Carter
would continually receive policy suggestions. An Inter- Agency
Group on Human Rights was formed "to examine bilateral/
multilateral aid decisions from the standpoint of human rights,
and to provide guidance on loan support and coordinate policy".
This Group gave advice to the Administration to support, abstain
from, postpone or oppose the granting of loans to a variety of
countries depending on their human rights record. In the first two
years the US Administration opposed more than 60 loans to 15
countries. Brzezinski, in his account, emphasized America's
world-wide concern, listing the release of political prisoners in
108
Peru, Chile, Indonesia, and the decline in "disappearances" in
Argentina. But there was no question that the US Administra-
tion's primary concern was to isolate the Soviet Union for
violations of human rights in contrast to the USA. This reflected
Brzezinski's hawkish attitude to the Soviet Union. He wrote: "By
the mid-1970s it became increasingly evident that detente was not
the panacea many thought it would be. Mounting public and
congressional pressures forced the Executive Branch to make
further movement in relations with Moscow contingent on the
Soviets' allowing greater freedom to emigrate and easing their
treatment of dissidents." 74 He stated: "I felt strongly that in the
US-Soviet competition the appeal of America as a free society
could become an important asset, and I saw in human rights an
opportunity to put the Soviet Union ideologically on the
defensive ... I suggested that by actively pursuing this commit-
ment we could mobilize for greater global support and focus
global attention on the glaring internal weaknesses of the Soviet
system". 75 In a memorandum to Carter, Brzezinski advised: "(i)
Scrupulous fulfillment of the Helsinki agreement. Hence it is
important that the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the agreement
be closely monitored, especially in regard to human rights.
Making it unmistakably clear to the Soviet Union that detente
requires responsible behaviour from them on fundamental issues
of global order . . ." 76
In this way 'human rights' became first a bargaining counter in
arms negotiations with the Soviet Union and then, in the hands of
President Reagan, an obstruction. The formula was taken up by
other Western governments with great enthusiasm and without
the slightest sign of hypocracy. Although Brzezinski was not a
social democrat, his approach to the Soviet Union appealed to
them for it enabled them to pursue anti-Sovietism whilst
disclaiming it, saving that their only concern was human rights. It
became fashionable for political leaders in the West to carry
dossiers about Soviet dissidents with them to meetings with
Soviet leaders. The practice was taken up by sections of the
European Peace Movement. The Campaign for Nuclear Dis-
armament in Britain, as is shown in a later chapter, gave high
prominence to the human rights issue and made satisfactory
relations with socialist Peace Movements conditional upon its
resolution. The Green Party in West Germany and Codene m
France adopted a similar posture. Immense publicity was given
when dissidents were released. Anatoly Shcharansky, for m-
109
stance, was received by the British Prime Minister and the US
President after his dramatic release over the Glienicke Bridge,
spanning East and West Berlin, on 1 1 February 1986.
The size of the dissident movement was always relatively small.
Peter Reddaway stated in 1974 that only about 2000 names were
known from all sources. 77 During 1977. Roy Medvedev, one of
the best known dissidents remaining in the Soviet Union, stated
that the "dissidents do constitute a relatively small circle, usually
alienated from the masses . . ." 78 Some estimates include nation-
alists and Jews with other dissidents while others do not. When
Dr Theodore Friedgut, Director of the Soviet and East European
Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, attempted
to assess the size of the dissident movement in 1974 he found that
it was a matter of conjecture rather than measurement, that it
included people who had registered no more protest than putting
their signatures on a petition and that, in any event, it constituted
"at best a tiny percentage of the intelligentsia". 79 The estimates of
the number of people who had signed petitions or contributed to
samizdat documents ranged from a few hundred to 3,000. The
most common estimate was in the region of 1 ,000 which is the
figure Friedgut's Institute arrived at after examining samizdat
sources in Russian. 80 Friedgut found that there were regions and
institutions in the Soviet Union with no known dissenters. In
other regions where there was some dissent it was not indigenous,
as in Riga the capital of the Latvian Republic, where the
participants "were Russians or Jews, with very few Latvians." In
general Soviet students were disinterested. Friedgut's view was
that dissidents comprised a "small and dwindling band" centred
in Moscow. 81
It is generally recognized that the dissidents came over-
whelmingly from the intelligentsia. "On the whole", Medvedev
stated, "they arc intellectuals". 82 "Socially", Reddaway added,
"the movement is overwhelmingly middle-class. Among its
informal leaders are a high percentage of people from research
institutes, including a disproportionately high number of math-
ematicians and physicists. Other leaders and supporters are
engineers, teachers, lawyers, writers, artists, journalists and
students, with a very small number of workers and military
men." 83 For a brief period from 1978, the Western media
claimed, there were rumblings of dissent in the Soviet trade union
movement. A group of workers, describing themselves as
unemployed, held two press conferences in Moscow in January,
HO
1978. announcing the formation of a Free Trade Union Associa-
tion. It claimed to have 110 candidate members but that 200
altogether were ready to join. The organizers made little effort to
spread their views among Soviet workers but concentrated on
influencing international opinion. They sent an appeal through
Amnesty International to the International Labour Organization
and trade union centres in Western countries for recognition as a
trade union. Amnesty forwarded the appeal with a copy of the
Association s statutes to the ILO. It was taken up by the British
TUC, the European Trades Union Congress and the International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions. The principal organizer,
Vladimir Klebanov, was a mining engineer so the appeal was
discussed by the National Executive Committee of the National
Union of Mineworkers at its meeting on 9 March 1978. The NUM
decided to raise the matter with the Soviet, authorities and the
Soviet Miners' Union. The TUC used its own channels, including
the Soviet AUCCTU, to seek clarification. The European TUC
had doubts about the objectives of the Association and held
judgement until the TLO had stated its opinion. This came in
April, 1978 when the TLO concluded that the documents received
did not constitute a complaint which it could take up through its
constitutional procedures. The issue did not rest there for the
Executive Board of the 1CFTU in May submitted a formal
complaint to the ILO alleging a contravention of the ILO
Convention on Freedom of Association. The National Executive
Committee of the Labour Party also had the matter on its agenda
and wrote to the TUC for information. Given the extensive
interest in Britain in the intentions of the group of seven people
who held the press conference on 20 January, 1978, it is probable
that a similar reaction was occurring in the USA and other
capitalist countries.
The British TUC doubted whether the Association could be
described as a trade union. It stated that "the material available
(indicated) that the members primarily sought to secure redress
within the Soviet system for grievances which they maintained
had been mishandled or ignored by the Soviet authorities, who
harassed them in various ways. Neither the constitution nor the
supporting material indicated that the Association was intended
to act as a union in an industrial sense . . ." 84 Then the TUC
received a reply to its letter' to the Soviet Ail-Union Central
Council of Trade Unions which outlined "the Soviet system for
dealing with labour disputes and dismissals, mentioned the recent
1 1 i
revision of legal provisions affecting labour inspection and dis-
missals, acknowledged by implication that complaints arose to be
dealt with, and stated that a number of trade unions had been
formed in the Soviet Union in recent years". It added that the
concept of a trade union implied an association of people of the
same occupation or employed in the same enterprise and that the
group comprising the complainants claiming to be a trade union
could not pretend to pursue trade union objectives. 85 These
comments, the TUC concluded, were directed at the substance of
the matter and settled it, 86
The organizers of the press conference which launched the
Free Trade Union Association were harassed by the police and
arrested, whereupon the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions complained to the Soviet Government of repres-
sion and the violation of trade union rights. The Soviet
government's reply stated that the allegations were unfounded
because the right to organize collectively was guaranteed by the
Constitution, trade unions had extensive rights to defend workers'
interests and the complainants had nothing to do with trade
unions or the occupational interests of workers whom they did
not represent. This did not satisfy the ICFTU which wanted the
Soviet government to detail why Soviet workers could not form
trade unions of the Western kind. In Britain, however, there was
satisfaction over the case in point, though at the 1978 Trades
Union Congress a motion calling for a charter for basic human
rights in all countries, but aimed at the Soviet Union, was carried
without a debate.
With neither internal nor external support the Free Trade
Union Association disappeared from sight. Nothing happened
subsequently to change the social character of the dissidents.
There was no sign that the Soviet workers felt the need to
emulate the Polish workers who had rebelled against the
Communist Party and the government by forming Solidarity in
1980 and 1981. 8 The dissident movement remained the "small
and dwindling band" of intellectuals including some Jews wanting
to emigrate, some religious objectors and a few conscientious
objectors. Amnesty International which monitored the arrest of
Soviet citizens for taking part in non-violent protests had listed
the names of 580 individuals in 1986 "whom it knew or suspected
to be prisoners of conscience . . . ,,8S Early in February. 1987. the
number had fallen to 530, of whom about 20 were Jewish
protesters and 11 were conscientious objectors. Then Andrei
112
Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner were unconditionally
released from internal exile. During the second week of February
a further 43 dissidents were released. The number who had
received pardons rose to between 140 and 150 before the end of
February. As all the cases of dissidents imprisoned under Article
70 were under review Amnesty's total was likely to fall further. A
Soviet Commission was established to examine, amongst other
things, the implications of Article 70. It was becoming difficult for
the West to continue using the issue of dissidents for anti-Soviet
purposes.
There are questions, however, which nonetheless need to be
raised about dissidence in the Soviet Union. The first one
concerns the reasons for dissent and the second the explanation for
the Soviet response to it.
There is no sense in which dissidents constitute an opposition in
the Soviet Union. They have no unity and the causes of their
dissent have no structural basis. There are Jews who wish to
emigrate, nationalists who wish to sever from the Soviet Union,
religious protestors who desire greater religious freedom, indi-
viduals who object to military service and intellectuals with mixed
motives. There is very little overlapping between the groups. The
physicist, Andrei Sakharov, who in the autumn of 1970 had been
a founder member of the Soviet Committee on Human Rights,
appealed in May the following year for the right of Jews to
emigrate. His identification with the Jewish campaign was
epitomized through his relationship with Elena Bonner, who is
Jewish and whom he met at a demonstration and subsequently
married. Sakharov's attitude, however, was unusual. Mostly the
various groups were divided by antagonisms. There were nation-
alists in the Ukraine and the Baltic Republics who were both anti-
Semitic and suspicious of Moscow based intellectuals. In the
main, each group was afraid that identification with any of the
others would spoil its case.
But why should only intellectuals be dissidents? Roy Medvedev
believed that intellectuals in most countries became the
dissidents Hy but that is clearly not the case in British history where
working-class trade unionists have been most prominent. His
explanation as to why others in the Soviet Union did not protest
was that they were afraid. This was the view of most Sovietologists,
expressed graphically by Theodore Friedgut who described
Soviet society as one atomized by fear and suspicion through a
system of "active networks of informers, both paid and
113
volunteer." 40 This favourite Western explanation fits the stereo-
type neatly but it bears no relation either to the history of the
Soviet people or people elsewhere. History shows that protest
derived from social forces cannot be permanently repressed,
though it may be temporarily defeated. Time and time again
ordinary people have risen against the most repressive regimes.
Russian workers rose against a cruelly oppressive system in 1905
and 1917; it was they who defeated the Western armies which
intervened in 1918. In the Second World War no people resisted
an invading army as determinedly as Soviet people. It was
generally believed until 1976 that physical protest was impossible
in South Africa and that, in any event, the black people had
neither the will nor the ability to engage in it. Then school
children in Soweto showed that the regime was vulnerable to
protest. Since 1976 ordinary black South Africans, without
facilities and often without organization, have continued and
intensified their struggles. Nicaraguan peasants and Chilean
workers have taken extreme risks in their struggle for freedom. It
is obvious that protest cannot be permanently muted by fear.
Soviet trade unionists do not engage in collective protest
against the system because there is no structural reason for it. The
intelligentsia, in the main, docs not protest either. So what
activates the minority that does protest? Firstly there is a close
identification between the aspirations of the disaffected segments
of Soviet society and Western democratic values. 91 In other words
some Soviet intellectuals are envious of the lifestyle and
individual freedom of Western intellectuals. They derive their
impressions of life under capitalism from international conference
centres and communications with Western academics who are a
privileged elite. Envy, however, is a sandy base for protest
because by its very nature it is individualistic.
The fragmented character of dissent is shown by the mixed bag
of motives given by dissidents for their actions. Roy Medvedev
commented about this in an interview with an Italian journalist in
1977. y2 Some writers, artists and film and stage directors, he
stated, became dissidents because they resented the restraints
which working within collectives imposed on what they described
as their natural creativity. Other intellectuals, such as Andrei
Sakharov and Valentin Turchin, both theoretical physicists,
began to protest because of events unconnected with their
working conditions. Sakharov, for instance, criticized attempts to
rehabilitate Stalin whom he believed was personally responsible
114
for the purges in the 1930s. Others joined in for selfish, personal
reasons. "Unfortunately", Medvedev stated, "Soviet dissidents
don't always represent only the best elements of the intelligentsia; a
lot of people dissent because they're unhappy with their private
or social lives. Many join the ranks out of sheer egocentricity,
urging foreign correspondents to broadcast to the whole world
their crude "proclamations, appeals, and horror stories, full of
ferocity." 93 He quoted the story of the Soviet poet Urin who
resigned from the Writers' Union and made statements which
were broadcast in Russian from a foreign radio station because
the Union refused to celebrate his fiftieth birthday.
The dissidents were politically divided. They ranged from
Solzhenitsyn who demanded the moral regeneration of the
Russian nation, meaning the restoration of the hegemony of the
Russian Orthodox Church, and whose politics were so reactionary
that he offended his American hosts, to Roy Medvedev who
wanted a purer version of Leninism. In between were social
democrats, liberals, apolitical humanitarians, nationalists, Christian
Socialists and Zionists. Their political postures were fluid.
Sakharov, for example, moved from neo-marxism in the mid-
1960s to liberal socialism and then liberalism, much to the
disquiet of Medvedev who believed that many of Sakharov's
statements and political actions had not been either well thought
out or rational. 4 Once having taken the initial step of opposing
Soviet communism and, by implication, identifying with Western
values, they reflected the politically diffused character of Western
pluralism. But whereas in the West pluralism is grounded in the
capitalist mode of production, in the Soviet Union it has no
material basis. The dissidents with their own specific recipes for a
backwards political transformation are, therefore, anachronisms
and misfits. They represent no problem to Soviet society except
insofar as they are used by the West to discredit communism and
to justify aggression against its practice. Soviet society un-
doubtedly possesses its own contradictions with consequential
social class formations, but these push it forward to a progressive
transformation of communism. The democratization of Soviet
society means releasing the social forces which will expedite this
transformation. It does not mean espousing bourgeois liberal
values for these belong to the Soviet past, not its future.
The Soviet Union has experienced great difficulty in coping
with dissent. Because the possession of power by the working
class was the pre-requisite for socialist democracy, its prcserva-
115
tion became the Soviet Union's primary consideration. Indeed
the preservation of working class power has become the
dominant value in the Soviet system and is reflected in Soviet law,
the operation of Soviet courts and the forces of law and order in
general. Tn a world environment which posed no threats to the
Soviet Union there would have been there an unparalleled
extension of workers' rights. The world environment, however,
was implacably hostile. Until the Second World War the Soviet
Union was enclosed within an ideological cordon santtaire.
perpetually threatened by subversive and economic destabiliza-
tion. The Bolshevik Revolution was consistently in danger of
being reversed. This situation generated a genuine fear of
counter-revolution and provoked a suspicion of dissent. The
grievous experiences of the German invasion in 1941 and the
subsequent Nazi attempts to eradicate communism from Soviet
society confirmed the fears and suspicion. The Soviet state
developed, therefore, explicit, complex and inflexible protective
mechanisms. A state apparatus was created to uncover, identify,
expose and arraign those who threatened the system. But in the
style of bureaucracies the apparatus lacked the facility to operate
with discernment and discrimination. It was incapable of identify-
ing degrees of dissent and of differentiating, therefore, between
that which involved opposition to the system, that which was
ineffective and irrelevant and that which was positive for the
society. It became sensitive to all kinds of dissent and tended to
repress it even when it was cosmetic, the figment of Western
imagination and hopes.
An additional complication was created by the fact that the
dissidents were primarily intellectuals for throughout Soviet
history and beyond into that of Czarist Russia, intellectuals have
been regarded with mixtures of suspicion, circumspection and
respect. The repressive Czarist state prevented the development
in the nineteenth century of a critical philosophy and social
science through which Russian society could be analyzed, leaving
literature, both prose and poetry, as the only effective means of
communicating intellectual criticisms of society. Thus novelists
and poets assumed a political significance in the eyes of both the
state and the general population. From Pushkin and Lermontov
to Tolstoy and Gorky, they were harassed by the police, arrested,
exiled. They became national heroes in their own time. Through
their works the written word assumed an almost mystical
significance as the vehicle for forbidden ideas. It was searched
116
out, avidly read and distilled for its hidden meanings.
The importance of the written word continued during and after
the Bolshevik Revolution. All of the principal Bolsheviks were
writers of high calibre. Lenin used the written word almost to the
limits of its capacity as a means of arguing his case and of
politicising others. Revolutionary feelings were expressed by
writers such as Mayakovsky whose poems succinctly expressed
the substance of the time. Artists too galvanised their talents to
symbolize revolutionary aims in posters. As illiteracy was
eliminated the Soviet people became avid readers and enhanced
the importance of literature, and, thereby, the significance of
writers. Literature continued to be a source of analysis, of
criticism and of praise.
People who are treated seriously by society must expect to
carry responsibilities and obligations. Where there are rewards
there are usually costs. A number of Soviet writers have
discovered this through their own experiences. Only where
intellectuals in general and writers in particular play no serious
critical analytical role, as in Britain, or where the system absorbs
their criticism like a sponge, as in the USA, is a general freedom
of expression permitted. In other words, where intellectuals are
harmless because they are ignored or in other ways disarmed,
they are free. But it is a spurious freedom.
Political Opposition
Yet despite the institutional restrictions on dissent there have
frequently been oppositional factions within the Communist
Party, while outside of it criticisms of the administration of
communism have been facilitated and encouraged. This reality is
in sharp contrast to the Western stereotype which portrays an
inherently and totally repressive Soviet society. For this reason
and because people find great difficulty in conceptualizing
beyond their own experiences, there is a general failure in the
West to understand the character and extent of criticism in the
Soviet Union.
There have always been different, contending approaches
within the Soviet Communist Party to the country's social and
economic problems. Just as there are sharp differences about
priorities within capitalist societies so there are arguments within
communist societies about the allocation of scarce resources.
Indeed the significance and complexity of policy options are
117
greater in the Soviet Union because there, decisions, which are
determined by the hidden hand of the market mechanism in
capitalist countries, are made consciously through the planning
mechanism after a process of analysis and debate. The course
taken by a capitalist country results largely from the interaction of
market forces whereas whether the Soviet Union industrialises or
not, the rate of its development, the allocation of resources
between investment and consumption, the development of
agriculture are all issues over which there are different views,
representing different political positions and reflecting social
forces which constitute interest groups in Soviet society.
The history of the Soviet Union is replete with illustrations of
intensely contested arguments about policy issues within the
Communist Party. During the 1920s the differences were institu-
tionalized in factions. This led Stalin to describe the Sixteenth
Congress of the Party in 1930 as "one of the few Congresses in the
history of our Party at which there is no opposition of any
crystallised kind, able to lay down its line and to counterpose it to
that of the Party' 1 . 95 For a decade there had been organized but
erudite debates about the role of trade unions in Soviet society.
This issue was overtaken in 1927, however, by proposals for the
First Five Year Plan and the collectivization of agriculture, both
of which were opposed by the Right Opposition. There were two
contrasting policies of industrialization. The opposition, namely
N T Bukharin, Mikhael Tomsky and A I Rykov, wanted to pursue
a path of industrialization within the framework of the New
Economic Policy which had operated since 1921. Stalin's pro-
posals, on the other hand, were for accelerated industrialization
involving the complete rejection of the NEP. Stalin won the
argument within the Party and by the time of the Sixteenth
Congress there was no serious criticism of the Party policy. The
leaders of the opposition were present but were quiet. Stalin
taunted them, though in a good-humoured manner. They were,
he said, "afflicted with the same disease as that of Chekhov's
well-known character Belikov, teacher of Greek, "the man
wrapped in padding". That character, Stalin elaborated, '"always
went about in galoshes and a padded coat, carrying an umbrella
in hot and cold weather. "Excuse me, but why do you wear
galoshes and padded coat in July, in such hot weather?' Belikov
used to be asked. 'You never can tell', Belikov would reply.
'Something untoward might happen; a sudden frost might set in,
what then?' Everything new, everything that was outside the
MS
daily routine of his drab philistinc life, he feared like the
plague . . . The same thing must be said about the former leaders
of the Right opposition ... As soon as any difficulty or hitch
occurs anywhere in our country they become alarmed, fearing
that something untoward might happen . . . they begin to howl
about a catastrophe, about the downfall of the Soviet regime".
Subsequent policy differences in the Party were not always
dealt with in such a polemical fashion. But there was always
opposition to the policy of the Party, even during its most difficult
years. The Party was never monolithic. The question of how fast
the rate of industrialization should be continued to arouse deep
feelings though other issues arose and new personalities appeared
around Stalin to propagate them. In the mid-1950s no one argued
against the notion of centralized planning and collectivization but
there were sharp divisions about the rate of development with G
K Ordzhonikidze, the Minister for Heavy Industry, favouring
caution and V M Molotov arguing for speed. y7 From about 1934
the state of the Communist Party became the issue which over-
rode all others. Andrei Zhdanov wanted to cleanse and rejuvenate
the Party through raising the consciousness of its members, using
education and propaganda while N 1 Ezhov argued for its
expurgation. There were always Right and Left or Moderate and
Radical factions over each important issue.
With the fall of Ezhov from power in 1938, Zhdanov assumed
responsibility for the press, agitation and educational departments
of the Central Committee. This put him in an advantageous
position to argue his case. From the Eighteenth Party Congress in
March, 1939, however, the argument was not over the condition
but the role of the Party and Zhdanov had a new adversary in the
Politburo. At that Congress he was partnered as a Secretary of
the Central Committee by Georgi Malenkov who believed that
the Party should have direct control over production in contrast
to Zhdanov who stressed the ideological work of the Party and in-
sisted that if the communists who manned the state organizations
worked consciously as communists there would be no need for
direct intervention by the Party. Malenkov's view was that the
Secretariat of the Party should supervise the Council of People's
Commissars (Sovnarkom) which was responsible for the country's
industrial administration rather than concern itself with achieving
theoretical clarity. He believed that 'political leadership' was too
nebulous when separated from direct involvement in running the
economy.
119
The role of the Party had been an important issue from the
outset in 1917 but it took on a new emphasis with the introduction
of centralized planning and complete state ownership in 1929. It
was present during the 1930s but submerged by the concern about
the Party membership. When that issue was settled the question
about how to run the economy became paramount. The different
perspectives were reflected in the main Central Committee
journals and in the editorials of Pravda. It was, however, a matter
which affected the whole Party apparatus for it determined the
relationship between the local Party secretaries and managers of
every enterprise in manufacturing industry and agriculture. It was
of particular concern to the new generation of low and middle
level functionaries who had taken office in the wake of the purges
and the Ezhovshchina. By the same token the level of conscious-
ness of those officials was the reason for Zhdanov's concern. 98
The dispute between Zhdanov and Malenkov continued for a
decade, until Zhdanov's death in 1948. Its outcome changed with
circumstances. In times of crisis, as during war, when there was
uncertainty about the country's political direction or when, in
confusion, the political direction became threatened, then the
Politburo came down on the side of Malenkov. When circum-
stances eased or when the needs of the situation demanded that
production should be given priority over everything else and that
Sovnarkom should be allowed to get on with its job unimpeded
by Party supervision, as in the immediate post-war years, then
Zhdanov got his way and the Party production branches were run
down. After Zhdanov's death Malenkov restored the influence of
the Party in production but that did not end the matter. Malenkov
himself became a casualty of the dispute but, ironically, for
protecting the state apparatus and over-riding the authority of the
Communist Party. When Stalin died, Georgi Malenkov became
the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Prime Minister, and
was responsible, therefore, for the economic administrative
apparatus of the state. At first Malenkov held both this post and
that of First Secretary of the Party but he soon relinquished the
Party post." Nikita Khrushchev succeeded him as First Secretary
and advocated the views which Malenkov had held in the
arguments with Zhdanov. Khrushchev, from the outset, attempted
to extend the Party's managerial role- u to give the lead to the
'managerial' rather than 'ideological' elements within the party,
to its cadre of working executives rather than its political-
ideological overseers, to the territorial party machines and not
120
the central apparatus". 100 Thus Khrushchev wanted to increase
the authority of the Party at the regional and local levels and in
{his matter too he was opposed by Malenkov who sought to
improve the efficiency of industry through further centralization.
The principal policy issues in the Politburo after 1953, apart
from the role of the party, were about whether to give priority to
consumption or industry and in what ways to develop argiculturc.
Malenkov was in the minority on both issues. He favoured
increased investment in the light industries and in developing the
established agricultural regions. As he had been responsible for
Soviet agriculture during Stalin's last years and the harvest yields
in 1954 were low, his agricultural policy had been tested and
failed. He took the blame for the failure and resigned from his
position as Chairman of Council of Ministers in 1955 to be
demoted to that of Minister of Electric Power Stations, though
until 1957 he remained a member of the Politburo. Khrushchev
took a different view about agriculture and advocated opening up
'virgin lands' in northern Kazakhstan, western Siberia and south
east European Russia as the primary means of increasing
production. This policy was applied and, at first, showed signs of
success. In 1956 there was a record harvest. Khrushchev's political
position was strengthened but opposition in the Politburo grew
because of other policies he pursued.
There was, first, the policy of 'De-Stalinization' introduced at
the Twentieth Congress of the Party in 1956. In practice this
involved the rehabilitation of many people who had been arrested
and sentenced from the mid-1950s onwards. The process inevitably
cast suspicion on a number of existing Communist officials,
including 3 or 4 members of the Politburo, including Molotov,
Kaganovitch and the veteran Civil War commander Voroshilov,
who opposed the policy. Others disliked it because they did not
accept the condemnation of Stalin made by Khrushchev. "It was
no secret to Khrushchev", Roy Medvedev wrote, "that he had
opponents in the Presidium, but they were not united: the
intrigues and feuds of the Stalin period still divided them. Yet
discontent with his activities mounted at all levels of the Party and
state apparatus as a result of his political and economic initiatives
in the first half of 1957." 101 The opposition was united by
Khrushchev's proposal to decentralize the management structure
of the economy. From the beginning of 1957 he rushed through
plans to abolish a number of central Ministries and substitute
them with territorial Economic Councils. The opposition in the
121
Politburo coalesced in June 1957 and a motion to dismiss
Khrushchev was passed,- The attempt was foiled, however, by the
Central Committee of the Party which comprised many Regional
Party Secretaries who had benefited from the decentralization.
The Politburo members who led the opposition, Molotov,
Kaganovitch and Malenkov, were described as the anti-Party
group. They lost their seats on the Politburo and were dismissed
from their posts. They were each given other jobs. Molotov
became the Ambassador to Mongolia, Malenkov was made the
director of a large electric power station in Siberia while
Kaganovitch worked as a manager of a factory. But their removal
did not resolve the issues which were the basis of their opposition.
Agricultural policy was a running sore. The 'virgin lands' policy
had both encountered problems and created others. Nearly half
of the area of the 'virgin lands' was damaged by soil erosion by
1964 due to the hurried efforts to get results. The maize harvest
failed and livestock production fell. There were food shortages
and the Soviet Union was compelled to import grain for the first
time. Khrushchev was assessed by his own predictions. In 1957 he
had declared that in about five years the Soviet Union would
catch up with the USA in her production of meat, milk and butter
per head of the population. Khrushchev had been popular with
most of the population in 1957 when the first attempt to unseat
him was made but by 1964 he was unpopular both with the
general public and with Party leaders. There was much dissatis-
faction with the methods and results of his leadership amongst a
majority of Regional Party Secretaries and state functionaries on
the Central Committee who had supported him in 1957. The
Central Committee confirmed his dismissal as First Secretary of
the Party in October 1964 after hearing 15 charges levied against
him. 102 Leonid Brezhnev, a secretary of the Central Committee,
succeeded Khrushchev as First Secretary and remained in that
position until his death in 1982.
The changes in the Soviet leadership which have been
described so far in this section have usually been attributed by
Western observers to "bitter manouvrcs . . . for influence and
power" between contenders. This, for instance, was how Brzczinski
described the dispute between Zhdanov and Malenkov."^ This
conclusion stemmed from the assumption made about the Soviet
Union that it is a monolithic totalitarian society. It is perceived as
being led by a dictator who imposes his own personal style of
stability. Thus any movement in the government of the society is
122
assumed to be derived from the actions of the leader. Policy is
deemed to be the consequence of decrees from above rather than
social forces from below. Struggles amongst the leaders is for the
succession and not about policies. The leader imposes stability by
the use of his dictatorial powers. Merle Fainsod typified this
approach in his work on the Soviet Union. In his comments about
Khrushchev he stated: "Khrushchev, like Stalin before him,
tolerates no derogation of his own authority, permits no
opposition to raise its head within the Party, and insists that the
Party function as a unit in executing his will." 104 He added that
'Like Stalin before him, Khrushchev monopolizes control of the
media of mass communications, saturating the channels of public
opinion with party propaganda and permitting no outlet for
political programs' which challenge his own". Thus political
opposition in the Party becomes simply a means for the First
Secretary to channel his changing whims. It exists purely at his
discretion. He treats the Politburo and Central Committee as if
they were puppets at the end of string he was holding. By the
same token the First Secretary is attributed with the responsibility
for all events which flow from the political centre. In this setting
there can be no seriously sustained political opposition. When
factions are identified then they are tolerated only in so far as
they serve the interests of the First Secretary, to enable him to
play one against the other.
This functionalist interpretation of Soviet politics held away
during Stalin's spell as Soviet leader after the war. When
Khrushchev took office it was amended to take account of the
obvious factional struggles in the Party. The focus was still on
power rather than policy but it was not just power for power s
sake. Some consideration was given to the issues behind it. The
work of Robert Conquest typified this new approach. It was,
however, only an amendment of the static totalitarian view of
Soviet society to bring it more into line with observed reality.
There was no recognition in it of the causal importance of the
contradictory forces which made up society's structure. The
amended approach was analogous to structural functionalism in
the field of sociology which emerged to take account of the
conflict in society which was seen to exist but which was not
recognized by functionalist sociological theory. The revised
theory was more plausible than the old one but retained its
conceptual inadequacies. It focussed on people who were seen as
individuals; it was concerned with personalities as the determinants
123
of behaviour; in its analysis of Soviet politics, therefore, it was
unable to escape from the Politburo and the formal Soviet
political structure. There is no doubt that the formal decision-
making framework of the Communist Party is an important
influence on Soviet politics and that within it the position of the
First Secretary is pivotal. But the communist leader interacts with
the forces within the Communist Party and responds to its
contradictions. The Communist Party is in a similar context in the
wider society. The contradictions in Soviet life permeate all levels
of political activity and are reflected in contrasting political
attitudes. It is impossible for any Soviet leader to fail to respond
to them.
The two decades which followed the dismissal of Nikita
Khrushchev were marked by relative internal stability. There was
an increase in dissent and the emergence of the Jewish Question
but there were no serious political challenges to the leadership,
For much of the time there was a collective leadership within the
Politburo comprising Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary of the
CPSU, A.N, Kosygin. Chairman of the Council of Ministers and
N.V. Podgorny, President of the Supreme Soviet USSR. The
Politburo itself became more widely representative of interests
within Soviet society rather than a collective of individuals who
had emerged through the party apparatus. In other words, its
members tended to be there because of" the positions they held
rather than for their personal qualities. For this reason there was
a high degree of stability in the membership of the Politburo after
1965. Changes became dependent upon ill-health or deaths. The
institutions of government, involving the Party and the state
organs, became more integrated and bureaucratized. Thus from
the mid-1960s the Soviet Union possessed a complex but unified
system of government which did not depend on individual traits
and which, in consequence, provided little scope for political
factions. 1 " 5
The integration of the political decision-making process narrowed
the perspectives of the individual decision-makers and lessened
their impact. There were fewer political leaders with the grand
visions of the future of communism than there had been in the
inter-war years. And those who were concerned about the future
rather than just the day to day events were circumscribed by the
bureaucratized system of policy-making. Quite clearly Yuri
Andropov, the Chairman of the K.G.B. and long-standing
member of the Politburo was in this position, as he revealed
124
during his brief tenure as First Secretary of the CP.S U, on the
death of Brezhnev in 1982. The general effect was that politics
became much less flamboyant after Khrushchev.
But there were other more profound reasons for the absence of
political discord during the Brezhnev period. The main issues
before the society were no longer the great dividing ones of
choosing the correct path to communism and resource allocation
between investment and consumption or manufacturing industry
and agriculture. They were instead a variety of non-divisive tasks
such as quality control, distribution, new technology and work
incentives which had administrative and technological solutions.
The primary aim was to make Soviet society work under the
prevailing structures along a pre-determined path. There was no
political disagreement about this.
The world environment facilitated for the first time non-
spectacular decision-making in the Soviet Union. Detente may in
retrospect have been illusory but at the time it afforded the Soviet
Union time and opportunity to get on with menial but important
tasks such as replacing the housing stock, constructing kinder-
gartens and improving educational facilities. The questions were
not whether to build homes or tractors but how big the homes
should be; not whether to build cars or tanks but how many cars
to build. World events, of course, had an effect upon Soviet
behaviour but none was seriously divisive. The Soviet intervention
in Czecho-Slovakia in 1968, the international campaign to get
Soviet Jews the right to leave and the increasing activities of
Soviet dissidents generated political arguments but not political
divisions.
Underlying these issues was a need by Soviet society for a spell
of political quiescence as a part of the healing process after a
series of traumatic events culminating in the war. Just to do
familiar things in the ordinary course of events, no matter how
inefficient or how politically circumscribed they were, was
therapeutic for the society as a whole. In psychological terms it
was a re-charging process through which communism in all of its
apparel became quietly and completely accepted as a way of life.
There is no doubt that the Brezhnev period of mundane politics
was as necessary for the progress of the Soviet Union as the
events which have followed. Unfortunately it carried with it a
number of characteristics which have had negative effects upon
the development of the Soviet economy. The attempt to correct
those effects has aroused political opposition again.
125
Mr Mikhacl Gorbachev, the First Secretary of the C.P.S.U
since 1985, has described the negative features of the Brezhnev
period in detail and has pronounced the policies to counter them.
The features were inertia, an unwillingness to come to grips with
the socio-economic issues, the emergence of an ossified concept
of socialist relations, the treatment of reality as if it were static, a
weakening of the economic tools of government, defects in the
planning mechanism and the emergence of an ideology and
mentality of stagnation which affected the operation of the
Communist Party, the organs of government, the work ethic,
culture, literature and the arts. The list was long and the
criticisms were uncompromising. 106 Bureaucratic inertia, which
lay at the base, led to corruption and crime. Some Party officials,
Gorbachev stated "abused their authority, suppressed criticism,
sought gain, and some of whom even became accomplices in, if
not organisers of, criminal activities."
The solution submitted by Gorbachev on behalf of the
Politburo lay in democratizing Soviet society. This has two
aspects, namely 'pcrcstroika' meaning restructuring, and 'glasnosf
or openness. He outlined the implications of the policy. ' The
main purport of our strategy is to combine the achievements of
the scientific and technological revolution with a plan-based
economy and set the entire potential of socialism going. Re-
organisation is reliance on the creative endeavour of the masses,
all-round extension of democracy and socialist self-government,
encouragement of initiative and self-organised activities, better
discipline and order, greater openness, criticism and self-criticism
in all fields of public life, and high respect for the value and
dignity of the individual . . . Re-organisation means vigorously
ridding society of any deviations from socialist morals, consistent
enforcement of the principles of social justice, harmony between
words and deeds, indivisibility of rights and duties, promotion of
conscientious, high quality work, and overcoming of pay-levelling
and consumerism . . . The final aim ... is to effect thorough-
going change in all aspects of public life, to give socialism the
most advanced forms of social organization, and bring out the
humane nature of our system , . . rlfi7 These aims, in short,
involve the restructuring of economic mechanisms, the alteration
of established administrative practices, the widening of the
sphere of decision-making to include ordinary people and the
election of senior management. They amount to a radical change
in established institutional practices. 'Glasnost' reinforces 'peres-
126
troika' by encouraging the discussion of issues and the criticism of
both institutional practices and officials who execute them. The
strategies thus threaten the positions of middle-level Party
functionaries, senior managers of enterprises and government
officials with a pincer-like movement which compels them either
to accommodate to the idea of institutional innovation or risk
being removed from their posts. Many of them, particularly at
regional level, are resisting what in effect is a 'cultural revolution 1
but there is opposition to the strategies at all levels from people
who either believe that they are wrong for the Soviet Union or
are simply suspicious and apprehensive of change like Chekhov's
character, Belikov.
The new democratizing policies are generating a widespread,
intense and open debate, with opinions ranging from enthusiastic
support to scepticism and outright condemnation. They have
emerged through the formal policy-making procedures of the
Communist Party. Their first formal presentation was at the 27th
Congress of the CPSU in February 1986. The broad political
strategies to achieve them were formulated at the Plenum of the
Central Committee of the CPSU which followed the Congress in
April. As the implications of the policies emerged so the
opposition to them became more overt and obstructive. The next
Plenum of the Central Committee, at which it was intended to
outline the strategies further, had to be postponed on three
occasions because of the opposition to democratization. In the
interim there was an extensive reshuffling of the personnel in
Moscow concerned with policy formulation. Following the April
Plenum. Mikhael Gorbachev stated, "a large part of the Secretariat
and heads of department in the CPSU Central Committee have
been replaced, practically the entire composition of the Presidium
of the USSR Council of Ministers has been renewed." 108 At the
Plenum of the Central Committee, eventually held in January
1987 to discuss "Re-Organization and the Party's Personnel
Policy". Mr Gorbachev stated that he and "other Politburo
members and Central Committee Secretaries had many meetings
and conversations with Members of the Central Committee,
public figures, workers, collective farmers, intellectuals, veterans
and young people" in order to assess opinion about the policy. He
spoke of the opposition but described it in structural terms. "We
see", he said, "that change for the better is taking place slowly,
that the cause of re-organization is more difficult and the
problems which have accumulated in society more deep-rooted
127
than we first thought. The further we go with our re-organization
work, the clearer its scope and significance become: more and
more unresolved problems inherited from the past come out." 109
The way in which 'glasnost' is being exercised by Mikhael
Gorbachev highlights that kind of Soviet criticism which is largely
incomprehensible to the West. The speech which he made to the
Plenum of the Central Committee in January. 1987, was in
Western eyes, a devastating critique of the Soviet system. "No
accomplishments", he said, "even the most impressive ones,
should obscure either contradictions in societal development or
our mistakes and failings ... at some point the country began to
lose momentum, difficulties and unresolved problems started to
pile up, and there appeared elements of stagnation and other
phenomena alien to socialism. All that badly affected the
economy and social, cultural and intellectual life . . . The main
cause - and the Politburo considers it necessary to say so with the
utmost frankness at the Plenary Meeting - was that the CPSU
Central Committee and the leadership of the country failed,
primarily for subjective reasons, to see in time and in full the
need for change and the danger of the intensification of crisis
phenomena in society . . . Comrades it is the leading bodies of
the Party and the state that bear responsibility for all this." He
listed some problems which they faced such as the use of socialist
property to obtain unearned income, the corruption of officials,
the spread of alcohol and drug abuse, the rise in crime, defective
planning and negative attitudes towards work. His language was
trenchant. "Disregard for laws, report-padding, bribe-taking and
encouragement of toadyism and adulation had a deleterious
influence on the moral atmosphere in society. Real care for
people, for the conditions of their life and work and for social
well-being were often replaced with political flirtation - the mass
distribution of awards, titles and prizes . , 10
This blistering criticism was not a form of flagellation which
carries no lessons and brings no changes, as is the case with the
Senate and Congressional Hearings in the USA. Nor was it a
statement that Soviet society is in danger of collapse. It was, on
the contrary, the use of self-criticism as therapy. It exposed some
elements but did not condemn the society. It was a special kind of
exhortation which other Soviet leaders have practised. Lenin
consistently used speeches to explain and exhort which were
models of analytical rigour. They acknowledged mistakes, defects,
defeats and setbacks without embellishment in the belief that
128
understanding reality was a necessary condition for action to
change it. This correlation implies that if the analysis is
deliberately distorted in order to hide unpalatable facts then the
policies derived from it will be defective. Objective analysis is
inevitably critical. When practised by political leaders it becomes
self-criticism. It was such analysis which led Lenin to the New
Economic Policy in 1921 and then convinced Stalin to institute
the First Five Year Plan and collectivization. It has, in the main,
featured in the Central Committee Reports to Congresses of the
CPSU though on occasions in the 1970s the analysis was fudged.
Gorbachev thus is following the policy of 'glasnost 1 practised by
Lenin,
Political self-criticism in the Soviet Union is an activity with
some risk but only to the individual leaders. When in 1921 Lenin
described the catastrophic food situation which was causing
widespread starvation his only motivation was to devise policies
to resolve it. 111 It was not an admission of failure but a
recognition of a particular constellation of forces. He did not fear
that his Party would be displaced as a consequence though he
himself might have been a casualty as Khruschev was in 1964. He
did not have to gloss over problems in competition with other
Parties or seduce voters with false promises. Nor did he have to
defend his own class interests against another. None of the
political forces which compel Western political leaders to disguise
failure, to project it on to the shoulders of others, to find scape-
goats, is present in the Soviet Union. Tt is this difference of
experience which makes the Soviet use of self-criticism largely
incomprehensible to people in the West.
Forums for Criticism
The Communist Party is the only legimitate forum for
organized political opposition in the Soviet Union. This follows
from the fact that it is the only political party and that, therefore,
only through it can government policy be changed. Any other
kind of opposition must, to be successful, act on the forces within
the Communist Party. Although the Party with about 17 million
members is large in absolute terms it remains a cadre Party,
comprising 15 per cent of the population. It operates therefore in
a milieux which is predominantly non-Party. In order to fulfil its
primary task of providing political leadership it has to understand
that milieux and respond to its pressures. It can only maintain its
129
position in the long-run by having credibility with the broad
population. It has, therefore, to produce the political decisions
which serve the whole of Soviet society. This does not mean that
the Party has to pursue a populist line. It is a leading Party and
has to initiate and experiment and, in consequence, on occasions
to take unpopular decisions. But unpopular, as well as popular
policies must relate closely to the needs of the society. There is no
sense in which the Party can lead without being a political sensor
and in order to be this there have to be mechanisms wherebv
criticisms, needs and aspirations of ordinary people can be com-
municated to the Party.
The milieux of the Communist Party is a collectivist one. The
ethos of the system is collectivism. All persons act through
collectivities at work and in their leisure. The society resolves its
economic and social problems, ranging from the anti-social
behaviour of an individual in a block of flats to the macro-social
issues, such as the character of the education system, through
discussion. There are facilities for meetings everywhere, in
Palaces of Culture, trade union offices, at work where every
factory or shop has a 'Red Corner' where workers meet before or
after work to debate issues and air their grievances. No major
changes in legislation arc made without wide-ranging debates. As
was stated earlier, the alterations to the Soviet Constitution were
preceded by wide-ranging discussion throughout the country. The
new 1936 Constitution stipulated that the USSR Supreme Soviet
should establish a Labour Code to introduce uniformity between
the various Republics. This was not done until 1970 when the
draft of the 'Fundamental Labour Legislation' was published in
the press for a nationwide discussion. Workers in factories and
offices, teachers and scientists, trade unionists and management,
engaged in discussions and submitted amendments to the Draft
Bill Commission. The 1936 process of nationwide consultation
was repeated when the Constitution was revised for the second
time in 1977. "The Constitutional Commission of the USSR
Supreme Soviet consisted of experienced Party and Government
officials and representatives of the working class, the collective
farm peasantry and the people's intelligentsia. Prominent scientists,
specialists and representatives of state bodies and public organ-
izations took part in drafting the Constitution. The draft was
considered twice at Plenary Meetings of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The draft
Constitution was put up for nationwide discussion which lasted
I 30
nearly four months at about a million and a half meetings at
factories, collective farms, in units of the armed forces and in
residential neighbourhoods. It was discussed at trade union
plenary, actif and general meetings, the Young Communist
League, co-operative societies and organizations of creative
workers. All the Soviet Union's Communists participated in the
discussion. There were more than 450,000 open Party meetings at
which over 3,000,000 people took the floor. The draft was
examined at sessions of all the Soviets, from rural Soviets to the
Supreme Soviets of constituent republics, that is, by more than
2,000,000 deputies representing the entire Soviet people. The
Constitutional Commission, the press received an endless stream
of letters from all parts of the Soviet Union . . . Upwards of
140,000,000 people, that is, more than four-fifth of the country's*
adult population, took part in discussing the Draft Constitu-
tion . . . About 400,000 proposals clarifying and amplifying the
wording of articles of the Constitution were put forwards . . ."" 2
Not a single law on education is adopted without a preliminary
nation-wide discussion. The 1973 Draft Fundamental Legislation
on Public Education was published in the press and discussed for
four months. 120 million people participated in the discussion of
the 1984 Draft Reform of General and Vocational Schools, a
particularly contentious proposal of which was that to lower the
age at which children start primary school from 7 to 6 years.
The means used to enable ordinary people to submit their
views about major changes in the law are, on the one hand,
collective organizations such as trade unions, the Young Communist
League and Cooperative Societies, where collective opinions are
expressed and, on the other hand, letter writing to the Communist
Party, government departments, trade unions and the press
through which both collective and individual views are communi-
cated. The means, however, are constantly available and are
continually used as forums for criticism. Trade unions are the
most influential means for they are mass organizations with close
relations with the Communist Party, access to government
ministries and, under the 1977 Constitution, the right to make
direct proposals for legislation. More than 99 per cent of the
labour force belong to trade unions, giving them, in 1987, a
membership of nearly 140 million. The rate of membership
participation is high. Indeed the quorum for local union meetings
is two-thirds of the total member-ship. The topics discussed at the
meetings cover all facets of union activity and range from work
131
situation problems to kindergarten facilities, education, housing
tourism, industrial health provisions, social security and foreign
policy. Workers, however, have other opportunities to discuss
their work situations and to criticize management. They meet i n
Work Collectives to discuss the problems at their immediate
respective points of production and in Standing Production
Conferences for matters at the enter-prise level. Through these
various means workers raise issues of bureaucracy, managerial
inefficiency, corruptio n and defective planning. Manv managers
have been dismissed as a result of complaints lodged by individual
workers backed by collective support.
The extensive and persuasive character of group discussion
should be a clue to the character of Soviet society. It is not
possible to combine a high level of universal education with a
system of decision-making and consultation based on collectives
and, at the same time, prevent debates which will lead to
criticism. This was learned early on by totalitarian states. Fascist
Italy, Nazi Germany, Franco Spain, South Africa and other
contemporary totalitarian regimes in Asia and South America
have all been compelled to ban every kind of public gathering,
even conversation by more than 2 or 3 people in the streets, in
order to preserve their totalitarianism. If people are allowed to
meet then surely they will talk and criticize. It does then seem
perverse of the Soviet Union, if it is trying to muzzle criticism, to
encourage group discussions.
A long-standing formal means for communicating individual
complaints are the Committees of People's Control. These were
started as Complaints Bureaus in April 1919 under the People's
Commissariat of State Control, to receive, investigate and check
complaints and statements by workers and peasants. In 1932
Stalin described the Bureaus as a means of countering bureaucracy
and red-tape. Since 1932 they have changed their designation but
not their purpose. They have become particularly active under
the 'glasnost' policy of Mr Gorbachev.
Letter writing to the press, trade unions, the Communist Party
and governmental departments is a particularly important forum
for enabling Soviet people to express their opinions. It has always
been regarded as a serious channel of communication both by
ordinary people and the government and has become protected
by law. At the Ninth All-Russian Conference of the Russian
Communist Party in September, 1920, a Special Control Com-
mission was formed on Lenin's initiative to deal with written
132
complaints sent to the Party. The resolution stated that "not a
single complaint should be left unanswered . . " In 1921 non-
party people were advised to criticize the Party if necessary. The
Special Control Commission was told in 1923 to handle com-
plaints "in a Party spirit" with no arrests or searches. From 1924
the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party began to
concern itself with letters to newspapers. For instance, in 1926 it
ruled that "letters sent to the press by workers and peasants
should be treated as serious sources of information about
complaints by information departments of Party Committees";
while the following year those who handled the complaints were
warned not to be "guilty of a condescending, patronizing attitude
to the complainants" for if they were they would be taken to court
and prosecuted. Readers Conferences were set up to discuss
complaints. Newspapers were given guide-lines for handling
letters expeditiously and were admonished if they failed. For
instance in 1936 the editors of two newspapers, the Northern
Caucasian Bolshevik and The Star, were dismissed for handling
letters incompetently, humiliating writers and forgetting that
"there is a living person behind every letter". The Supreme Soviet
in 1981 stipulated that all complaints and letters to. State, Public
Bodies, Enterprises, Establishments and Offices should be replied
to within one month and those which could be answered without a
follow-up should have a reply within 15 days. In consequence,
trade unions, the Communist Party and newspapers have
established departments to deal with letters. Each letter is filed;
every letter gets an answer. Many arc collective ones. In 1983,
6,000 collective letters were sent to the All-Union Central
Council of Trade Unions. The newspapers Trud, Pravda and
hvestia receive in the region of one million letters each year.
Comparisons:
There is a similarity between democracy in the Western
capitalist countries and the Soviet Union in that, at bottom, it is
about ordinary people running their own lives. After that there
are profound differences. The Soviet Union starts off with a
structure which has no major class or power divisions. The
working class is the only class and the problem is finding ways in
which it can permeate the decision-making process directly and
through representatives. The extent to which that is done is the
measure of Soviet democracy.
133
Soviet society is a collectivist one so that its democracy cannot
be gauged by the degree of individual freedom to criticize, oppose
and subvert. Individuals achieve their freedom through that of
the collectives to which they belong. Their interests, therefore,
are subordinate to collective ones. But this subordination does
not mean that individuals play no part. On the contrary, they
constitute the collectives and the quality of their deliberations
and interactions determines the level of collective achievement.
Thus democracy in the Soviet Union has a positive connotation.
It is not simply about the right to attack and discard but also
about the task of building and improving.
The manner in which the Soviet Union has tackled this task has
been significantly influenced by its own environmental condi-
tions. Throughout most of its history it has been compelled to act
as if it were under siege, guarding against external attacks and
internal subversion. This situation generated a climate of sus-
picion, the visible signs of which were restrictions on the right of
expression and punishment in corrective labour camps or internal
exile for those who violated them. The Soviet Union's own
democratic processes were an inevitable casualty. The country
went through phases of fluctuating intensity about its security. Its
concern was high during the Civil War, during the period leading
up to the Second World War, during the War itself and its
immediate, Cold War, aftermath. Restrictions on the freedom of
expression varied as the concern about internal security changed.
But they were never absolute and during some periods were insig-
nificant. The need to be alert about threats to the system, however,
gave rise to institutions whose task it was to regulate dissent, thus
bureaucratizing repression. Bureaucracies have the tendency to
respond automatically to signs without sensitivity about the nature
of the issues. In the Soviet context this meant that dissent was
sometimes repressed even when it was marginal and in no sense a
threat. This has happened during the last two decades when dis-
sidents have been neither numerous nor united in intent.
The question which arises is whether the action which has been
taken against dissidents has given character to the whole of Soviet
society as commentators in the West suggest. Is a society repressive
because it harasses a marginal group of protesting intellectuals?
Quite clearly repression is repression whatever the numbers or
special positions of those affected. The circumstances of repression,
however, cannot be ignored. Nor, in relation to those circum-
stances can the marginal character of repression be disregarded.
134
In other words, the combined effects of the transformation from
capitalism to socialism and the intense resistance of international
capitalism to the transformation made it impossible for Soviet
society to develop logically on the premise of socialism. There
were bound to be distortions, even mutations, in the practice of
administering society. None of these consequences, however,
have been shown to be endemic to Soviet society for they have
changed in quality and eased in intensity. In this respect the
marginal character of dissidents does have a relevance. The
historical experience of the Soviet Union indicates that its treat-
ment of dissidents has not been a function of internal structural
conflicts but mainly of international circumstances. Given a pro-
pitious international environment the Soviet Union would have
practised a tolerance of dissent consistent with socialist values.
A wholly different picture of the character of Soviet society
emerges if human rights are viewed in their wider and more
appropriate sense, as is described below in chapter seven. Then
the right to dissent is put alongside other rights such as the right
to live, to work, to be educated and to be healthy. If poverty is
regarded as tyranny and unemployment is treated as a denial of
human rights, then the Soviet Union scores against all capitalist
countries. But. it can be argued, making comparisons between
the defects of different societies is invidious. It does not correct a
wrong because others have committed it too; even if they have
committed it doubly. But by comparing the records of the accusers
it may help to understand their motives and their priorities. The
major Western capitalist countries would be lowly placed on a
league table of broadly based human rights. The USA has a record
of consistent discrimination against its black population and a
systematic denial of even basic human necessities to the Native
Americans. Its intervention in Vietnam caused approximately 4
million casualties while in Chile the democratic system as well as
many lives were the casualties of American interference. No
American can accuse the Soviet Union of human rights violations
without applying double standards. Then what of US allies? What
penance is required of West Germany for its genocidal treatment
of its Jewish inhabitants and the Jews in Europe in general?
Moreover, through the policy of Bcrufsverbote it denies employ-
ment to people because of their political beliefs. Turkey, a
member of NATO, applies a particularly brutal form of political
discrimination involving torture and long prison sentences. The
complete leadership of the Confederation of Progressive Trade
135
Union (DISK) was arrested in 1981 for engaging in normal trade
union activities. The government demanded death sentences for
all 51 members of the union executive. By 1986 as many as 1 ,477
trade unionists were standing trial. South Africa, America's close
political ally has an indescribable record of violence against black
people. Britain, of course, has a colonial history which reaches
into the present through discrimination against black immigrants
and its own black citizens. Its contemporary treatment of Irish
Catholics in Northern Ireland through the operation of jury-less
Diplock Courts and on the English mainland through the Preven-
tion of Terrorism Act seriously stains its own record. The selection
of the Soviet Union for special denunciation by such countries
seems rather suspicious. But, perhaps, before a conclusive judge-
ment can be made the Soviet Jewish question and the wider human
rights issue should be examined.
FOOTNOTES
1 . Lenin Collected Works, vol. 28 , p, 230.
2. ibid, p. 246 and p. 248.
3. The Soviet Impact on the Western World, op cit, p. 5,
4. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 249.
5. ibid. p. 242,
6. ibid, p. 243.
7. See The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, by F. H Carr, Penguin Books,
vol. 2.
8. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 32. p. 172. Speech to the Tenth Congress of
the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) March. 1921 .
9. ibid, pp. 185-6.
10. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party of Bolsheviks was renamed
the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in March 1918 in order, Lenin
stated, to conform to the terminology formulated by Marx and Engels in
the Communist Manifesto.
1 1 . This was recognised by Soviet critics of the Communist Party such as Roy
Medvedev. See his work Let History Judge.
12. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 30, p. 327. A speech made on 2 February 1920.
13. A Historv of the USSR by Andrew Rothstcin, p. 1 06.
14. ibid, p. 245.
15. See Origins of (he Purges by J Arch Getty , p . 1 1 2 .
16. Szymanski, op cit, pp. 228-229.
17. Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 3, November. 1982, p, 46.
18. "On Assessing the Size of Forced Concentration Camp Labour in the
Soviet Union, 1929-56" by S G Whcatcroft. Soviet Studies, vol. XXXI 11,
No. 2, April, 1981, p. 266.
19. Gulag Archipeligo, 1973, (Fontana edition) p. 595.
20. The Great Terror, p. 71 3 .
21 . "Analysis of Forced Labour Statistics" by S G Whcatcroft, Soviet Studies,
April, 1982, p. 227,
136
ft '22 The Great Tenor, p. 706.
-An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labour. 1929-56 .
Soviet Studies, Vol. 33, January. 1981. A polemic developed between
Whcatcroft and Rosefieldc over the question of Soviet labour camps. They
differed over the role of forced labour in the industrialization of the Soviet
Union and over the size of the camp populations from !929 until Stalin's
death. Whcatcroft consistently accused Rosefieldc of exaggerating the
significance of forced labour and the size of the camps. The Slavic Review.
The American Quarterly Journal of Soviet and East European Studies,
took up the questions in its autumn issue. No. 3. in 1985. It allowed
Whcatcroft and Rosefieldc to make comments on each other's position
and then invited two specialists in Soviet demography. Barbara A Anderson
and Brian D Silver, to review the debate in an article called "Demographic
Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR". The issue by that
time had become a straight-forward demographic one. namely, "what was
the loss of Soviet population due to forced labour camps and collectiviza-
tion?' This led to a further question about the amount of excess mortality
between 1929 and 1963. The authors covered Conquest's intervention in
the debate and reviewed the main analysts of Soviet population statistics.
In a closely argued article they concluded with a gentle reprimand for those
who made unwarranted assumptions about the data and supported Wheat-
croft's approach. The main goal of the article. Anderson and Silver stated
had "been to demonstrate the sensitivity of estimates of excess mortality to
assumptions about the "normal" trend's in fertility and mortality. If one
were able to make defensible assumptions about these trends, one might
reduce the range of uncertainty about the extent of excess mortality. But a
considerably greater effort to defend assumptions, to verify the quality of
extant demographic data, and to determine what the actual demographic
trends were Is needed before more precise estimates of excess mortality
during the 1930s can be made. Stephen Whcatcroft" s work has been very
helpful in moving scholarship in that direction. Wc hope that increased
awareness of the sensitivity of any estimates to the assumptions will help
scholars to avoid making or tolerating unwarranted interpretations of the
data." (Slavic Review. No 3. Vol. 44. pp. 535-6).
24, ibid. p. 65.
[ 25. ibid. p. 60.
26. ibid. p. 51. ^. ,
27. Communist Party Membership in the USSR 1917-1967, by T H Rigby.
Princeton. New Jersey, 1968. p. 214.
28. The Great Terror, p. 754.
29. Lei History Judge, p. xxxii .
30. Smolensk Under Soviet Rule by Merle Fainsod. 1 958. p. 3.
I 31. ibid. p. 12.
32. Quoted by Whcatcroft in Soviet Studies. Vol . X XXV . 1 983. p. 232.
I -33. Szvmanski , op cit . p. 247.
34. ibid, p. 229.
35. Getty, op cit. p. 41).
36. The "most detailed Western source for Communist Party membership
changes is Rigby . op cit.
37. ibid. pp. 178-179.
137
38. Getty, op cit. p. 54,
39. Quoted in Getty, op cit. pp. 67-68.
40. ibid, p. 55.
41. ibid, p. 66.
42. "Towards a Thorough Analysis of Soviet Forced Labour Statistics" bv S G
Whcatcroft, Soviet Studies, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, April 1983, p. 227.
43. Getty, op cit. p. 88.
44. ibid. p. 89.
45. ibid. p. 110.
46. Up to 1936 only the city and village Soviets were elected by direct election
Other levels comprised of delegates elected from the body at the next level
down. Sec A History of the USSR, by Andrew Rothstein. pp. 238-248.
47. Gettv. op cit. pp. 137-149.
48. ibid, p. 158.
49. ibid, p. 164.
50. Roth5tein.opcit,p. 252.
51 . See Getty, op cit, p. 1 68 for details of the situation in the WesTern Region.
52. ibid, p. 178.
53 . Let History Judge, p , 365 .
54. ibid, p. 351.
55. Rigby, op cit, p. 21 1 .
56. Stalin: A Political Biography, 1949. p. 384.
57. ibid, p. 212. Similar figures are found ir " Analysis of Forced Labour
Statistics" by 5 G Whcatcroft. Soviet Studies. Vof. XXXV. No. 2, 1983.
pp. 226-7.
58. Szymanski. op cit, p. 241 .
59. Rigby, op cit, pp. 217-219.
60. Getty, op cit, p. 175.
61. ibid, p. 206.
62. Stalin: The Man and his Era, 1 973, p. 419.
63. ibid. pp. 418. 420 and 421.
64. ibid. p. 422.
65. Gettv. op cit. p. 203.
66. ibid, p. 203.
67. Dissent in the USSR, cd. by Rudolf L Tokes, 1975. p. 60.
68. Uncensored Russia by Peter Reddaway. 1972. p. 20.
69. Power and Principle. Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1 977- 1 98 1
byZbignicwBrzezinski, 1983. p. 150.
70. See How to Secure Peace in Europe by Denis and Cynthia Roberts 1985.
for the full text of the Helsinki Declaration and an informative interpreta-
tion of it.
7 1 . Prisoners of Conscience In the USSR: Their Treatment and Conditions. An
Amnesty International Report. 1980, p, 20.
72. Brzezinski, opcit. p. 124.
73. ibid. p. 126.
74. ibid. p. 124,
75. ibid. p. 149.
76. ibid. p. 150.
77. The Soviet Union Since the Fall of Khrushchev, edited bv Archie Brown
and Michael Kascr. 1975. p. 128.
138
78. On Soviet Dissent by Roy Medvedev, 1980, p. 2.
79. Tokes, op cit, p. 123.
80. ibid. p. 124.
81. ibid, pp. 126-127.
82. Medvedev, op cit, p. 2.
83 . Reddaway in The Soviet Union Since the Fall of Khrushchev, op cit, p. 128.
84. W C Report, 1978, p. 259.
85. ibid, p. 60.
86- Documents relating to the ease including biographical details of some of
those involved were published in Workers Against the Gulag, edited by
Viktor Haynes and Olga Semyonova, Pluto Press, London, 1979.
87. I travelled extensively throughout the Soviet Union in 1982 talking with
trade unionists and found no sign of the unrest which was manifest in
Poland.
88. Amnesty International Report, 1986, p. 310.
89. On Soviet Dissent, op cit, p, 6.
90. Tokes, op cit, p. 128.
91 . Reddaway, The Soviet Union Since the Fall of Khrushchev, op cit, p. 131 .
92. On Soviet Dissent, pp. 2-7.
93. ibid, p. 5,
94. ibid, p. 4.
95. J Stalin Works, Vol. 13, p. 1 .
96. ibid, pp. 13-14.
97. Getty, op cit, pp. 14-17.
98. See "The Origins of the Conflict Between Malenkov and Zhdanov:
1939-1941" by Jonathan Harris, Slavic Review, vol. 35. No. 2, 1976.
pp. 287-303.
99. Khrushchev, The Years in Power by Roy A Medvedev and Zhores
A Medvedev, 1977, pp. 2-7.
100. Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership by Carl A Linden, USA. 1966,
p. 30.
101. Khrushchev by Roy Medvedev, Oxford, 1982. p. 11 2.
102. ibid, pp. 235-245.
103. The Permanent Purge, op cit, p. 23.
104. How Russia is Ruled by Merle Fainsod, Harvard, USA, 1963, p. 583
105. For an interesting examination of the structure of the Soviet Government
see Politics and the Soviet Union by Mary McAuley, Penguin Books, 1 977,
106. See Mr Gorbachev's speech to the Plenum of the Central Committee of the
CPSU, January 27th 1987, Moscow News, Supplement to issue No. 6,
(3254), 1987.
107. ibid.
108. ibid.
109. ibid.
110. ibid.
111. Lenin Collected Works. Vol . 32, pp. 441-449.
112. Constitution of the Socialist State of the Whole People by Alexander
Kositsin, Moscow, 1979, pp. 11-12.
139
Chapter Six
The Jewish Question
It is not possible to discuss the issue of human rights in the
Soviet Union without examining the position of Soviet Jews for
there have been repeated accusations in the West that the Soviet
authorities practise anti-Semitism. The allegations have been
based on claims that Soviet Jews face discrimination in education,
employment and in the refusal of the government to allow them
an unrestricted right to emigrate. But the Western case is more
complex than this for it involves the Soviet attitude to dissent in
general. As was seen in the previous chapter, a number of Jews
have been arrested and imprisoned for dissident activities but this
was in no sense related to their Jewishness. The core of the case
concerning Soviet Jews is not about dissent but arises from the
fact that on the one hand the West has elevated the right to
emigrate as a principal human right and on the other hand the
Soviet Union controls emigration and, therefore, regulates the
distribution of exit visas to Jews. Claims that Soviet Jews are dis-
criminated against in other ways are made to support that grievance.
Jews and the Revolution
The Jews are a recognized ethnic group in the Soviet Union
but, unlike the others, without a natural homeland. They have
been concentrated however, in European Russia -in the Soviet
Republics of the Ukraine, Byelorussia and Lithuania-in areas
annexed initially by Czarist Russia from Poland early in the
nineteenth century and described as the Pale of Settlement.
There, indeed, they were confined by the Czarist authorities in
ghettos, repressed and subjected to frequent pogroms. As they
always lived under restrictions their activities were channelled
into a narrow occupational range. In 1818, for instance, over 85
per cent of gainfully occupied Jews in Russian controlled
140
territories were merchants of different kinds— traders, estate
managers, tax collectors and money lenders. Most of the
remainder were artisans. 1 As Russia industrialized during the
course of the nineteenth century non-Jews competed for the
traditional Jewish occupations. The position of the Jewish
middleman was undermined. The "state came to monopolise the
collection of taxes and the production of liquor . . . intensified
domestic production of many goods aided by tariff barriers,
ruined the livelihood of many exporters and importers. Capital,
credit and jobs formerly generated by the wealthiest elements of
the Jewish community dried up as they mobilised funds for
external investment in banks, railway construction, sugar-beet
and oil production. Modern financial institutions obviated the
need for so many petty money-lenders. Aside from the few who
became wealthy businessman or highly educated professionals,
the members of the Jewish community were thus turned into
peddlers, hawkers and small shopkeepers; owners of small,
undercapitalised enterprises engaged in the production of cloth-
ing or footwear; or artisans employed in those workshops." 2 In
the early twentieth century even these activities began to be
squeezed by the growth of large-scale capitalist enterprises. Jews
became increasingly impoverished, oppressed by a series of
government regulations aimed at creating assimilation but which
in effect exacerbated already existing prejudices and constantly
subjected them to social and physical hostility from the non-
Jewish population.
The Jews in Russia, then, had good reason to oppose the Czarist
regime and to welcome its overthrow in March 1917. They became
free in an instant. "With a strike of the pen the Provisional Govern-
ment abolished the whole complicated network of laws directed
against the Jews. Suddenly their chains fell off. Disabilities and
discriminations were cast on the refuse heap . . ," 3 But they were
not so pleased when the Bolshevik Party seized power in
November of that year. There were a number of Jews in leading
positions in the Bolshevik Party but by and large they disliked the
communist policies aimed at eliminating profit-making and usury
from economic activities. The Bolshevik Revolution destroyed
the traditional occupations of Jews but placed them in the same
position as all other citizens of the new state. There was some
reversal to profit-making during the period of the New Economic
Policy from 1921 to 1929 but it came to a dramatic and painful
halt when the First Five Year Plan in 1929 extended state
141
planning lo every sphere of economic activity. The last vestiges of
profit-making were removed when agriculture was collectivized
in the early 1930s and the property of the kulaks, the rich peasant
class, was confiscated. The Jews were forced to adjust to the life
expectancies of the majority of ordinary Russians. By 1935 there
were three times as many Jewish manual workers as there had
been in 1926. 4
Many Jews suffered in the upheavals following the Revolution.
Pogroms broke out in the Ukraine and Byelorussia during the
Civil War. mainly facilitated by the White Russians. "As a result,
Jewish attitudes began to shift in a pro-Bolshevik direction from
late 1918 onwards: anti-Soviet sympathies came more and more
to be associated with pillage and death, Bolshevism with the
suppression of anti-Jewish violence." 5 But their businesses were
destroyed nonetheless and their way of life was upset. Once the
Soviet government was established there was no further physical
violence against the Jews. The social and economic problems they
faced had no ethnic causes. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb wrote
in 1935 after an intensive study of the Soviet Union: "The
condition of thousands of Jewish families in White Russia and the
Ukraine is still one of poverty relieved only by the alms of their
co-religionists . . . But they suffer, not as Jews but as shopkeepers
and moneylenders whose occupation has become unlawful. They
are protected from violence as never before. They retain their
synagogues and their vernacular speech. Their sons and daughters
find all branches of education, and all careers, open to them. Many
thousands of families have been assisted to settlement on the
land. Wherever there is a group of Jewish families together they
have their own local government and their cultural autonomy.
They are not prevented from maintaining their racial customs and
ceremonies . . ." 6
But there were ethnic difficulties, nonetheless, though they did
not always arise from the Soviet society. "It cannot be denied"
the Webbs added "that all the blessings of security from pogroms
and freedom to enter professions that the USSR accords to the
Jews involve, in practice, their acceptance of the Soviet regime;
and make, on the whole, for assimilation. The policy of the Soviet
Union accordingly meets with persistent opposition, and even
denigration, from the world-wide organization of the Zionists,
among whom the building up of the "national home" in Palestine
brooks no rival." ' The problem posed by Zionism for Soviet Jews
simmered until well after the formation of Israel and then, following
142
the Six Day War in 1 967. it began to boil.
The Soviet government tried to cope with the influence of
Zionism by allocating a piece of virgin territory at Birobidzhan in
1928 as the basis for a Jewish homeland. This land in Eastern
Siberia, with no indigenous inhabitants, was half as large as
England and was well equipped with resources for agricultural
settlements with a climate similar to a Canadian wheat province.
It was formally established as a Jewish Autonomous Region in
1934. But it failed to attract an adequate number of Jewish settlers.
It had a total population of about 50,000 in 1934, most of whom
were Jews. But the Jewish element in the Region declined as Jews
became assimiliated into Soviet life. About 90 per cent of Soviet
Jews chose to live in towns and most of those who worked in agri-
culture preferred the warmer climate of the Ukraine and the
Crimea. Their interest in Yiddish education in general dropped
off. There were more than 1000 Yiddish language schools in the
early 1930s and at least two dozen Yiddish language newspapers.
Between 1928 and 1935 about 3650 books were published in
Yiddish. 8 All of these activities declined as the pace of industriali-
zation increased and as Jews were drawn into it. Then, with the
Second World War most such activities were brought to an abrupt
end. But by that time the picture had emerged of Jews becoming
preponderantly professional people, experiencing what would be
described in the West as 'upward social mobility'. They worked in
all major Soviet institutions. They held positions, for example, in
the NKVD and had a marked presence in all ranks of the Red
Army. During the Second World War, 500,000 Jews served in the
armed Services and more than 300 of them were Generals.
Soviet Jewry in War
The population of approximately 3 million Jews in the Soviet
Union in 1939 was largely concentrated in the Ukraine and
Byelorussia in the areas bordering Eastern Europe. Another 2
million Jews came under Soviet jurisdiction through the Soviet
occupation of Eastern Poland and the addition of Lithuania. Four
million of these people lived in areas over-run by the German
army after June 194L The Nazi government, while planning the
invasion of the USSR, decided to annihilate the Jews in the
territories occupied. Special mobile death units called Einsatz-
gruppe were to follow directly behind the frontline troops and
round up Jews to be killed. These units were given the special
143
facility to operate "not only in army group rear areas but also i n
the corps areas right on the front line. This concession was of
great importance to the Einsatzgruppe for the Jews were to be
caught as quickly as possible. They were to be given no warning
and no chance to escape." 1 " An agreement to this effect was
signed by Reinhardt Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security
Main Office, at the end of May, 1941. It was generally under-
stood to sanction the killing of Jews, Communists and insane
people on the spot. There were four units, totalling about 3,000
men, and led almost without exception by professional men such
as a lawyer, a physician, a church pastor and a professional opera
singer.
The units were expert killers. In the first wave between June
and December, 1941 they murdered half a million Jews mainly
through mass shootings at large grave sites. A second wave of
killings initiated to take account of those accidentally missed on
the first occasion resulted in almost 1 million deaths. The Soviet
authorities evacuated many Jews to safe areas. Hilberg reported
that "the Einsatzgruppe which operated in the central and eastern
Ukrainian territories found that many Jewish communities were
reduced by 70-90 per cent and some by 100 per cent. In Melitopol
an original Jewish population of 11,000 had dwindled to 2000
before Einsatzgruppe D arrived. Dnepropetrovsk had a pre-war
Jewish community of 100.000; about 30,000 remained. In
Chernigov, with a pre-war Jewish population of 10,000. Sonder-
kommando 4a found only 309 Jews. In Mariupol and Taranrog
Einsatsgruppe D encountered no Jews at all. On the road from
Smolensk to Moscow Einsatzgruppe B reported that in many
towns the Soviets had evacuated the entire Jewish population." 1 ' 1
Altogether about 1 ,500,000 Jews succeeded in eluding the killing
units. These evacuation measures were taken when virtually the
whole of Soviet industry was on wheels, being relocated in and
beyond the Urals. It was Gejman practice as they entered Soviet
territories to encourage the local populace to engage in pogroms
against the Jews as a first stage in their genocidal policy. They had
some success in those areas which had become part of the Soviet
Union since 1939 but in the Soviet Union proper there was no
evidence of spontaneous anti-Semitism. A Jewish historian
commentated that "In Byelorussia, a conspicuous difference is
evidenced between the old Soviet part of the region and the area
which had previously belonged to Poland and was under Soviet
rule from September 1939 to June 1941. Nazi and anti-Jewish
144
propaganda drew a weak response in the former Soviet Byelorussia:
we encounter complaints in Nazi documents that, 'it is extremely
hard to incite the local populace to pogroms because of the
backwardness of the Byelorussian peasants with regard to racial
consciousness. , " > 12 Another view of the cause of the racial
attitudes in Byelorussia was given in a secret memorandum by a
collaborator to the chief of the German army in August 1942. He
wrote: There is no Jewish problem for the Byelorussian people.
For them, this is purely a German matter. This derives from
Soviet education which has negated racial difference . . . The
Byelorussians sympathize with, and have compassion for the
Jews, and regard the Germans as barbarians and the hangman of
the Jew, whom they consider human beings equal to
themselves . . ."' 3
There is much evidence provided by survivors themselves to
support this view of the Soviet attitude to the Jews. 14 Contrary to
the general opinion of Jewish docility in the face of Nazi violence
there was large-scale Jewish participation in the partisan move-
ment in the German occupied part of Soviet Union. Indeed the
German army blamed the Jews for starting guerrilla activity. The
German generals had rationalized their co-operation with the
killer units "through the pretence that the Jewish population was
a group of Bolshevist diehards who instigated, encouraged, and
abetted the partisan war behind the German lines. The army thus
had to protect itself against the partisan menace by striking at its
presumable source - the Jews " 15 This, of course, fitted in with
the Nazi inspired belief that there was an international Jewish and
Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at undermining Western civilization.
The army's attitude was based on a half-truth for many Jewish
families and survivors did take to the forests and fight back. They
fought in the same way and for the same purpose as hundreds of
thousands of other Soviet citizens. They also suffered and
survived in the same way, Jews, Russians and Communists were
spoken of in the same breath by the German invaders. The
general instruction was that they were to be shot on the spot.
Western Attitudes to Jewish Refugees
While Soviet Jewry was being slaughtered the Germans built
six extermination centres in Poland to annihilate the rest of the
European Jews. Almost 3 million Jews from most parts of
European went to their death in those camps throughout 1942,
145
1943 and 1944. At first the perpetrators of extermination tried to
keep their actions secret. They engaged in secret communications
and used code words like final solution for systematic extermination
and special treatment for gassing. Nonetheless the news perco-
lated out to the West. News reports were published from July
1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, listing and
describing massacres. The New York Times carried articles about
them. The BBC broadcast news items referring to the numbers
killed. 16 It was clear in the West by mid 1942 that the Germans
were engaged in a mass extermination programme and that all
European Jews were at risk. Two million Jews had already been
killed. No other evidence should have been needed.
This situation presented a test both of the capacity of Britain
and the USA for humanity and of the presence of anti-Semitism.
It concerned human rights on a mammoth scale and should be
indelibly printed on the memory of history. No nation who failed
the test should have ever been able, without hypocracy, to accuse
another of anti-Semitism or of infringing human rights. It left
scars on all the nations who could have helped, as well as on
Germany the perpetrator.
It was a test because there were real opportunities to rescue
European Jews. Tt was not until the end of 1941, just before the
'Final Solution' was agreed at the Wansee Conference, that the
Jews were finally stopped from leaving Europe. By then almost a
million Jewish lives had probably been lost. But there were at
least 4'/2 million Jews alive then who subsequently died. Some of
those millions might have lived.
The question then is, while the Soviet people in all the
Republics west of the Urals were struggling for their lives and
taking special precautions to evacuate Jews, what were the only
two countries which were in a position to help them, namely
Britain and the USA, doing? Both countries exercised strict
immigration regulations under the influence of anti-Semitic
establishment attitudes. Jews began to seek asylum away from
Germany as soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933. The British
Cabinet expressed its view then for it agreed to "try and secure
for this country prominent Jews who were being expelled from
Germany and who had achieved distinction whether in pure
science, applied sciences, such as medicine or technical industry,
music or art. This would not only obtain for this country the
advantage of their knowledge and experience, but would create a
very favourable impression in the world, particularly if our
146
fcnsoiwlitv were offered with warmth." 1 ' Th,s hypocritical
broach to the vicissitudes of German Jews persisted until the
"£r started The official British attitude to Jewish immigrants in
* neral was that Britain was a country of transit and not of
gttlement. Moreover, in so far as Britain accepted Jew,s*
r e s, the government had extracted an understanding from
S organizations that the refugees would provide them whh
financial Support so that they would not be a charge on the
S " In consequence, most Jewish immigrants came through
Xidua and professional contacts. Then from 1939 German
"nd Austrian Jews were treated as enemy aliens so that any
admission to Britain had to be on a negotiated basis with the
^h" Unhed States operated a rigidly restrictive
quota system which was underpinned by the fear created by the
Great Depression that refugees would damage the ,ob prospects
of unemployed Americans and by widespread and intense anti_
Semitic feelings. The quota system limited the number of
Emigrants from any particular country it, any one year ir™pc£ve
of circumstances. Germany had a fixed quota and that was that.
The Jewish question had no bearing on it. The ant.-imm.gra t.on
pressure groups, however, succeeded in keeping the actual
numbers admitted to about only 10 per cent ot the quota which
could have been admitted.' 1 ' The US immigration laws more-
ove imposed particular restrictions on Jewish refugees because
hey contained a prohibition on those •likely to become a publ.c
charge' 20 From October, 1934, the Naz, government allowed
^emigrant to take out only about four do ars. Under Section
7fc1 of the 1924 Immigration Act applicants for visas had to
produce a police certificate of good character for the previous five
yeafs a re ord of military service and other data, an almost
impossible task for fleeing Jews. The immigration law s refl ^cted
public feelings. In 1938 just as the persecution of the ews wa
intensified "four separate polls indicated that from 71 to 85 per
cent of the American public opposed increasing the quotas .»
help refugees. And 67 per cent wanted refugees kept out
altogether 8 In a survey taken in early 1939, 66 per cent even
oSed to a one-time exception to allow 10,000 refugee : children
to enter outside the quota limits^ 1 Not surprisingly he USA
admitted only slightly more refugees than Britain in the year
leading to the war. Altogether between 1933 and 1939, about
370 000 Jews left the German Reich. Of these 57,000 went to the
147
USA and 50,000 to Britain. The remainder went mainly to
Palestine, France, Belgium and Switzerland.
The news of the holocaust percolated into Britain and the
United States slowly and in an abridged form, often in short
articles on the inside pages of newspapers or, as in the case of the
BBC on 2 June 1942 with the facts of extermination but without
emphasizing that they were part of a programme. It aroused
neither governments nor public to action. When, for instance, the
Nazis offered to allow 2000 Jews to leave Luxembourg in 1940 the
British government refused to admit them into the British
Commonwealth: nor in 1942 would it allow 1000 Jewish children
to enter Vichy France. 2, Britain, of course, controlled the
admission of refugees to its then vast Empire and to Palestine.
Yet it virtually sealed the refugee outlets from Europe and
refused to admit Jews to those countries where it exercised power
over entry. As one government official remarked, the British
Empire had an absorption capacity of nil when it came to Jewish
refugees. 24 The British policy on Palestine for the duration of the
war was set by a 1939 White Paper which specified that Palestine
was not to become a Jewish State, that the sale of land from
Arabs to Jews was to be restricted and that even though "His
Majesty's Government are conscious of the present unhappy
plight of large numbers of Jews who seek a refuge from certain
European countries'. 2 ^ a quota of 10,000 immigrants a year for
the next five years was to be imposed, though "as a contribution
towards the solution of the Jewish refugee problems, 25.000
refugees will be admitted as soon as the High Commissioner is
satisfied that adequate provision for their maintenance is
ensured . . . ,,2(1 The constant flow of illegal immigrants into
Palestine during the 1930s was intensified after the Nazis moved
into Poland and the Soviet Union. This law-breaking activity
offended the British official mind so that during the war the
British authorities were pre-occupied with preventing the rescue
of Jews. Coastal patrol vessels intercepted refugee ships
approaching Palestine, diverted them, sent them back, even fired
on them. The ships, packed with fleeing people under inhuman,
insanitary conditions, were left without food and provisions,
sometimes for months. 27 The British with a perverted sense of
fairness, after putting the illegal immigrants in internment camps,
subtracted their number from the official quotas.
Both Britain and the USA refused to bomb Auschwitz as a
means of stopping the extermination process there. 2<s Auschwitz
148
operated as a killing centre for 32 months. The average rate of
killings for the whole period was about 4.100 per day. About half
of those were Jews while the majority of the remainder were
Soviet prisoners of war. When the proposals to bomb it were
made the camp was operating at its maximum which could have
been as high as 6000 killings each day.
The American record on refugees was no better than that of
the British. The British public showed more understanding of the
Jewish tragedy towards the end of the war than did its
government fo'r in the USA the public remained implacably
opposed to allowing Jewish refugees into their country. After the
appalling facts of genocide were known, 78 per cent of a sample
asked whether "it would be a good idea or a bad idea to let more
immigrants come into this country after the war"' thought it was a
bad idea. And at the end of 1945, with news of millions of
displaced persons in Europe, only 5 per cent in the poll thought
the USA should admit more immigrants than before the war.-
Government practice was consistent with public opinion. It is best
described by David S Wyman in his detailed study of the
American responses to the holocaust. He concluded that:
"1. The American State Department and the British
Foreign Office had no intention of rescuing large
numbers of European Jews. On the contrary, they
continually feared that Germany or other Axis nations
might release tens of thousands of Jews into Allied
hands. Any such exodus would have placed intense
pressure on Britain to open Palestine and on the United
States to take in more Jewish refugees, a situation the
two great powers did not want to face. Consequently,
their^ policies aimed at obstructing rescue possibilities
and dampening public pressures for government action.
2. Authenticated information that the Nazis were
systematically exterminating European Jewry was
made public in the United States in November 1942.
President Roosevelt did nothing about the mass murder
for fourteen months, then moved only because he was
confronted with political pressures he could not avoid
and because his administration stood on the brink of a
nasty scandal over its rescue policies.
3. The War Refugee Board, which the President then
established to save Jews and other victims of the Nazis,
149
received little power, almost no co-operation from
Roosevelt or his administration, and grossly inadequate
government funding. (Contributions from Jewish orga-
nizations, which were necessarily limited, covered 90
per cent of the WRB's costs). Through dedicated work
by a relatively small number of people, the WRB
managed to help save approximately 200,000 Jews and
at least 20.000 non-Jews.
4. Because of State department administrative policies,
only 21,000 refugees were allowed to enter the United
States during the three and one half years the nation
was at war with Germany. That amounted to 10 per
cent of the number who could have been legally
admitted under the immigration quotas during that
period.
5. Strong popular pressure for action would have
brought a much fuller government commitment to
rescue and would have produced it sooner. Several
factors hampered the growth of public pressure.
Among them were anti-Semitism and anti-immigration
attitudes, both widespread in American society in that
era and both entrenched in Congress; the mass media's
failure to publicize Holocaust news, even though the
wire services and other news sources made most of the
information available to them; the near silence of the
Christian churches and almost all of their leadership:
the indifference of most of the nation's political and
intellectual leaders; and the President's failure to speak
out on the issue. 3,5
There was no mention in the West during the almost indescrib-
ably harrowing years for European Jews from 1933 until 1945 of
the hallowed right to emigrate. There was much sanctimonious
rhetoric about human rights but no action. One statistic encapsu-
lates the sense of the period: for the whole year of 1944, 5.606
refugees, mostly Jews, were allowed into the United States. 31
This was less than the daily rate of killing at one killing centre,
Auschwitz, in the same year. When the whole macabre picture of
mass extermination had been unfolded, eight days after the end
of the war with Germany, Mr Herbert Morrison, the Labour
leader who was the British wartime Home Secretary, made his
views about Jewish refugees known to the Cabinet:
150
"as regards such persons [refugees] in the United
Kingdom he was clear that we ought to act on the
assumption that those who had come here had done so
temporarily, and that they should eventually go back
whence they came. It was often said that the Jewish
refugees in this country were terrified of returning to
Germany. We should not be influenced by this attitude.
It was possible that post-war Germany would abandon
anti-Semitism altogether. If the Jews were allowed to
remain here they might be an explosive element in the
country, especially if the economic situation
deteriorated.
The question of resettling refugees, many of whom were Jews,
after the war continued to be a sensitive human rights issue but it
ceased to be focussed only on Britain and the USA. Jews were
able to travel to a multiplicity of countries. The creation of Israel
as an independent Jewish state in 1948 provided displaced Jews
with a homeland. From 1948 until the Yom Kippur War in 1973 it
was the rise of Israel in a hostile Arab environment which
dominated the attention of the West towards Jews. Israel, based
primarily on American capital, became a Middle-East outpost tor
US imperialism and, therefore, a strategic participant in the Cold
War It became the sensitizer for anti-Semitism and played its
part by focussing on the treatment of Soviet Jewry. Tn doing so,
Israel provided the West with a powerful ideological weapon in its
campaign of anti-Sovietism. Its litmus test was simple: opposition
to Zionism in general and Israel in particular constituted anti^
Semitism. The Soviet Union, as Sidney and Beatrice Webb
learned, was highly critical of Zionism in the inter-war years. Ye
ironically, it was support from the Soviet Union, against
ambivalence by the USA. which ensured the de jure creation of
Israel in 1948. The Soviet view was put succinctly by Mr Andrei
Gromvko. then the Soviet Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, m
a speech before the Genera! Assembly of the United Nations on
14 May 1947. He said: 'The aspirations of a considerable part ot
the lewish people are linked with the problems of Palestine . . .
Durum the last World War indescribable pain and suffering were
experienced by the Jews . . . This fact . . . explains the Jews
aspirations to extablish their own State. It would be unjust to
ignore or to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this
aspiration." 33 The USSR was amongst the first countries to give
151
Israel diplomatic recognition. This initial enthusiasm became a
casualty of Israel's commitment to the USA during the Cold War.
It was reported in Colliers, a widely circulated American
magazine, in October 1951, that Israel had agreed to act as a
bombing base for the USA in the event of a nuclear war with the
USSR. 34 The Soviet leader, Mr Nikita Khrushchev, stated the
Soviet attitude in May 1957 when he said: "Our position towards
Israel is determined by the Cold War, and we hope that this is a
passing phenomenon. 1,35 The Soviet Union supported the Arab
states in their successive wars against Israel and has backed the
Palestinian Arabs in their struggle for independence. After the
1967 Six Day War in which Israel was victorious, the Soviet
Union broke off diplomatic relations with Israel and they have
not yet been restored.
The Process of Assimilation
Israel s role in the Cold W f ar, combined with a vision of
Zionism as an international capitalist conspiracy, created a
paranoia in the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party after
1948 about the intentions of some leading Soviet Jewish intellec-
tuals. There was no real evidence that the Jewish intellectuals
were disloyal but from 1948 until after Stalin's death in 1953 there
was no tolerance for those whose loyalty appeared to be to
Zionism rather than the Soviet Union. In 1948 the entire system
of Yiddish language teaching was suppressed. Twenty-five Soviet
Jewish leaders, many of them Communists, were arrested, tried
and executed. For five or more years Jewish intellectuals were
intimidated. There was a framc-up of Jewish doctors in which
they were accused of planning to use medical means to kill off
Soviet leaders. About 430 members of the Jewish intelligentsia
were sent to concentration camps where many of them died. This
blot on the record of Soviet ethnic relations has left stains which
are difficult to erase. Yiddish language teaching has been
resumed and Yiddish publications are appearing again. But
affirmative action cannot eradicate fear quickly or easily.
Although many Soviet Jews were undoubtedly affected by the
purge of their intellectual elite the vast majority of Jews were not
materially threatened. Those, ranging from L M Kaganovich, a
Bolshevik since 1911, Politburo member since 1930 and the
wartime head of the Soviet railways, to Jewish generals,
managers, scientists, doctors, teachers and workers in collective
152
farms and state farms as well as mines and factories, lived as
before and continued the process of occupational development
w hich had been interrupted by the war. Soviet society at large
had not been afflicted by anti-Semitism. There had been no
measures to discredit Jewishness. Yiddish continued to be spoken
in Jewish homes though a declining proportion described it as
their native language. In 1959 this proportion was 21 .5 whereas in
1979 it had fallen to 14.24. In 1926 it had been 72.6. This recent
decline was partly the result of the emigration of Yiddish
speaking Jews in the 1970s and partly because of an increasing
tendency of Soviet Jews, like those in all other countries, to speak
the language of the country to which they belonged.
The population of Soviet Jews declined from 2.3 million m 19:>9
to 1 8 million in 1979, representing only 0.7 per cent of the total
population. This decline resulted mainly from a low fertility rate
among Jewish women, a high percentage of mixed marriages, the
children of whom were not registered as Jews, and emigration.
Almost 74 per cent of Soviet Jewry is now concentrated m the
Russian and Ukranian Republics but, as the following table
shows, in no Republic do Jews constitute more than 2.03 per cent
of its total population. The vast majority are second generation
urban dwellers; indeed in the 1970 census only 2.1 per cent were
classified as rural- 26 per cent lived in Moscow, Leningrad and
Kiev. The rest were scattered in relatively small cities.
Soviet Jewry is not a homogeneous group. It consists of
different types and degrees of Jewishness. The main distinction is
between the 'heartland' and the 'periphery". About three-
quarters of Soviet Jewry live in the -heartland' which comprises
these areas which have been part of the Soviet Union for two
generations. These people have experienced the greatest degree
of assimilation in Soviet society. They tend not to be religious.
Thev generally live where there are no centres of Jewish social or
religious activity. They are highly educated. Many of them belong
to mixed families. These factors have been both a consequence
and a cause of assimiliation. They have reinforced the assimiha-
tion process. It "is generally agreed". Zaslavsky and Brym
commented, "that degree of Jewish identity varies inversely with
level of education and rate of out-marriage, and proportionately
with use of Jewish language 1 '.
The periphery consists largely of the Baltic Republics which
have had only a post-Second World War experience of belonging
to the Soviet Union and where, in consequence, the assimiliation
153
TABLE I
THE DISTRIBUTION OF JEWS IN THE USSR
ACCORDING TO THE 1979 CENSUS 37
NUMBER % OF TOTAL % OF % URBAN
REPUBLIC
OF (000's)
POPULATION
SOVIET JEWS
IN 38 1970
RSFSR
701
0.51
38.7
97.4
Ukraine
634
1.27
35.0
98.3
Byelorussia
135
1.41
7.5
98.3
Uzbekistan
100
0.65
5.5
97.0
Moldavia
80
2.03
4.4
97.8
Georgia
lo
U.ju
1 .o
Azerbaidzhan
35
0.58
1.9
98.8
Latvia
28
1.11
1.6
99.1
Lithuania
15
0.44
0.8
99.1
Tadzhikistan
15
0.40
0.8
98.7
Estonia
5
0.34
0.3
97.7
Kazakhstan
95.3
Kirkiziya
95.6
Turkmenia
98.5
Armenia
35
0.15
1.93
97.1
TOTAL
1,881
0.69
100.00
97.9
process has been relatively brief. anti-Semitic forces have not
been entirely eradicated and Jewish traditions have tended to
survive. The periphery also includes Georgia, Uzbekistan, Azer-
baidzhan and the mountain regions of the Caucasus. There, many
Jews are non-Ashkenazi Jews whose origins lie in Persia rather
than Germany and for whom religion is still a vital component of
their lives. They are Messianic and regard the creation of Israel as
the ultimate Jewish objective. They live in small, traditionally
based communities where their activities have changed little since
the Revolution. For these reasons the non-Ashkenazi Jews have
possessed the highest level of Jewishness amongst all Soviet Jews.
But they were a minority, numbering only between 50,000 and
60.000 during the post-war years till 1970.
The socio-economic position of Jews was transformed after the
revolution "from a destitute community engaged in occupations
with no future into an exceedingly highly educated group placed
154
well up in the Soviet system of social stratification ... In less
than two generations the majority had undergone a series of
metamorphoses from peddler to physician, shop-keeper to
research scientist, artisan to engineer . . . ,,4 ° A critical commen-
tator added that "A remarkably upward social mobility, based
on the acquisition of higher education, transformed the Soviet
Jews in just two generations. Instead of being a community
dislocated by war and concentrated mainly in the starving market
towns of the former Pale of Settlement, as they were in the first
years of the advent of Soviet rule, they are now a cultural,
technical and scientific elite . . . This is a success story which
rivals, and perhaps overshadows the economic and social achieve-
ments of North American Jewry . . ." 4I A similar point was made
by Zaslavsky and Brym when they stated that "it is an entirely
open question whether the Jews' rate of upward mobility in the
USA - "the land of golden opportunities 1 - has been at all
higher". 42 , £ -
The evidence of the prominence of Soviet Jewry m Soviet
intellectual life is compelling. Jews are by far the most highly
educated ethnic group. The number with a university education is
four times the national average. Their position in graduate
education is even more pronounced. In 1973 there were more
Jewish doctors of science in absolute terms than from any other
ethnic group except the Russians. For example, although there
were 41 million Ukrainians, the Jews, with a population of just
over 2 million, had twice as many doctors of science. In 1973,
Jews represented 0.9 per cent of the total Soviet population but
1.9 per cent of all university students, 6.1 per cent of scientific
workers, 8.8 per cent of all scientists and 14.0 per cent of all
doctors of science. 43 This disparity was greater in the main urban
centres. In Moscow, for instance, where Jews were 3 per cent of
the population in 1970 they comprised 13.6 per cent of all
scientists and 17.4 per cent of doctors of science, the equivalent m
Britain of university professorships. In that same year the number
of people from the top six different ethnic groups who had
completed higher education, for every 10,000 persons over the
age of 10 years were as follows: 44 Jewish, 239; Georgian, 155;
Armenian, 76; Estonian, 66; Russian, 60; Ukrainian, 58.
This picture was part of a changing process in which educational
opportunities were being equalized by affirmative state action.
Jews were early beneficiaries of affirmative action and. as a
result, developed both the expectation that their children should
155
reach at least equivalent educational standards and the environ-,
mental facilities to make that possible. It there had been no
contemporary administrative intervention in regulating access to
higher education then jews as an ethnic group would have
become an established educational elite at the expense of other
ethnic groups whose cultural and environmental characteristics
had disadvantaged them. The consequence for Jews is that they
constitute a declining proportion of the Soviet student body. In
1960 they made up 3.2 per cent of the student body but only 2.3
percent in 1970. This decline has continued. 4 "' They were 15.5 per
cent of all scientific workers in 1950 but only 6.9 per cent in 1970.
The declining Jewish involvement in higher education is in part
the negative side of afffirmative action favouring other ethnic
groups. They are not alone, however. The number of Estonian
graduates fell by 20 per cent between 1970 and 1973 while the
number of Armenian and Georgian graduates fell by 10 per cent.
There are other factors. Official Soviet policy is to preserve a
certain proportion of available university places for the children
of workers and peasants. In the Law Faculty of Moscow
University, for example, such people are given 20 per cent of first
year places. The children of the intelligentsia could easily fill all
the places. Because Jews figure prominantly in the intelligentsia
some Jewish applicants are bound to be unsuccessful. Within the
Republics university selection procedures favour local ethnic
majorities and this operates against Russians, Ukrainians and
others as well as Jews who may be local minorities in all
Republics. Irrespective of all other factors which influence the
entrance of ethnic groups to higher education, there was a rapid
and tremendous expansion in higher education in general and
scientific training in particular from the 1950s which was bound to
upset the ethnic balance at the time by creating its own
influences. From the early 1970s Jewish emigration raised the age
structure of Soviet Jewry. Between 1971 and 1976 it is estimated
that about half of the emigrants were under the age of thirty thus
diminishing the volume of Jewish applicants to universities for a
number of years. 46
Given the number and variety of pressures shaping the ethnic
character of higher education in the Soviet Union since the end of
the Second World War it is virtually impossible to identify 'official
anti-Semitism 1 as a dominant influence. Even where discrimina-
tion against Jews can be identified this is more likely to be part of
the equalizing process than a racist act. Jews, very much like
156
other ethnic groups, have to compete in the increasingly intense
competition for university places; they may have to search for
places amongst the non-prestigious institutions in outlying Re-
publics where the minority quotas have not been filled: they may
be compelled to enrol as factory or agricultural workers either
permanently or until they can gain access to higher education. In
each of these situations the sensation of exclusion may teel like
discrimination but it is a widely-shared experience without any
racial basis.
One other factor relating to the assimilation of Jews into Soviet
society is their membership of the Communist Party. Jews have
figured prominently as communists. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek,
Trotsky and Sverdfov were Bolshevik leaders during the Revolu-
tion. Jacob Sverdlov was President of Bolshevik Russia during
Lenin's time. Since then Jews have played a prominent though
changing role in the Communist Party. A quarter of the
membership of the Central Committee was Jewish in the 1920s
while thev comprised almost 5 per cent of the total Party
membership- Their involvement in the leadership declined from
the 1930s. L M Kaganovitch in Stalin's administration was the last
Jewish member of the Politburo. It was to be expected, that as
the Communist Party grew and a large non-Jewish urban
intelligentsia emerged, the Jewish involvement in it would
diminish. It did so but not in proportion to its position in the total
population. Tn 1976, 294,774 out of the 16 million Party members
were Jews, representing 1 .9 per cent. This meant that one out of
every six or seven Jews eligible to join the Party had applied and
been accepted into it. The actual rate of application was most
probably higher because most Jewish applicants would have been
intellectuals who had a restricted access to the Party compared
with workers. Nonetheless Jews had the highest rate of Party
affiliation of anv ethnic group at 137 per thousand compared with
the next highest, the Georgians, with 80 per thousand. Put
differently, at least 13.7 per cent of the total Jewish population
from 1970 were members of the Communist Party. They were the
most "Party-saturated" Soviet nationality, 47 despite intensified
anti-Sovietism bv Jewish groups in the West.
The generalized picture of Soviet Jewry then is that it is highly
urbanized with at least 80 per cent living in cities, mostly without
Jewish communities or access to Jewish religious or cultural
activities. It is highly educated and forms a significant segment of
Soviet scientific and technological intelligentsia. Many Jews
157
occupy leading positions in Soviet institutions. They have a social
status which is commensurate with their educational attainments
Their material well-being is high by Soviet standards partly
because of their occupations, partly because they have small
families and partly because they are urbanized. Their commitment
to the communist system is expressed through their dispropor-
tionate presence in the Communist Party. In the main, the
relative position of the Jews is deteriorating but this is largely
because previously disadvantaged ethnic and occupational groups
are encroaching on them.
Igor Birman, an economist who emigrated from the USSR in
1974 assessed the position of Soviet Jews as follows: "Zionist-
oriented Jews . . . are a distinct minority. The great mass of
Soviet Jewry has been thoroughly assimilated. Few know Yiddish
and almost no one knows Hebrew . . . Even the most casual
observer must admit that the number of believing and practising
Jews is extremely small . . „ Thorough assimilation and anti-
rcligious feeling are in large measure ... a result of education.
From this also springs a lively interest in cultural values, and the
over-whelming majority of Soviet Jews have become people of
Russian culture in the broadest sense of the word, not solely in
terms of language. For all practical purposes little remains in the
country of the Jewish cultural tradition; thus, the majority of
Jews have embraced Russian culture, literature and even history
as their own." 48 The exceptions to this picture were mainly to be
found amongst the half a million Ashkenazi Jews in the regions of
the 'periphery' and the non-Ashkenazi Jews who resided mainly
in Georgia. The social position of many of those Jews was similiar
to that of Jews in the "heartland 1 but there were factors in their
environment which obstructed assimilation. This, then, was the
situation when large-scale Jewish emigration from the Soviet
Union began in 1971.
The Soviet Attitude to Jewish Emigration
The genera] description of Soviet Jewry, then, is of a relatively
privileged minority which is distinguishable from the rest of
Soviet intelligentsia only by the nationality entries in their
internal passports. They generally live dispersed with other
Soviet citizens in urban communities, revealing their Jewishness
either in their inner family relationships or even, perhaps,
concealing it in their own minds. In all objective respects most of
158
the m are as other Soviet citizens except that they derive more
social benefits from Soviet society than the rest.
Why then is there such an outcry in the West about the
condition of Soviet Jewry? Why is the Soviet Union abused as an
oppressive society for its attitude to Jews and described as anti-
Semitic? And why, more particularly, should about 256,450 Jews
have emigrated to Israel and the USA in the decade following
3971? What contradictions in their lives caused so many to leave
Soviet society?
Many people have offered answers. Peter Ustinov, for instance,
wrote: Tf todav there are demonstrations in the United States
and elsewhere in support of Soviet Jewry, it is largely because of
the creation of the State of Tsrael, and the reluctance of the Soviet
Government to allow an exodus in the direction of a National
Home to the creation of which it was amongst the first to
subscribe." 49 A different perspective was expressed by William
Mandel who wrote that "The interest in Soviet Jews in the United
States and Canada is a consequence of their numbers, not in the
USSR, but here in the United States. Of all the Americans with
roots in what is now Soviet territory, Jews are the most
numerous, actually outnumbering the Ukrainians, Lithuanians,
Armenians and all the others combined." 50 Most explanations,
however, published in the popular press and those learned
journals which have arisen to analyze Soviet Jewry point the
finger at the Soviet Union and accuse it of totalitarianism because
it refuses to grant the primary and elementary freedom to
emigrate. They state that anti-Semitism is the cause of the
exodus.
The Soviet Union has an attitude to emigration which is
contrary to that currently prevalent in the West. There are two
aspects to it. One concerns the rational use of resources while the
other stems from socialist morality. The Soviet Union has
experienced full employment since the beginning of the Second
Five Year Plan in 1934. In effect it has been short of labour, a
situation seriously worsened by the casualties of the Second
World War. Thus the labour situation imposed on the Soviet
Government a dire need to conserve labour power by preventing
wastages to other countries as well as by controlling its domestic
utilization. Both tvpes of measures would, in any event, have
resulted from the government's use of centralized planning
measures. Tt would have been illogical and self-defeating to plan
the use of all resources except labour power. The planned use of
159
labour, however, involved restricting the right of individuals to
take their skills to another country.
There is a moral argument against free emigration. If, f 0r
instance, the emigration of a physician prevents a community
from having adequate health care whose right should be given
priority? Should the doctor's right to leave the society be
protected or should the community's right to health care be
upheld? The issue has been crudely expressed through the
experience of India where the unrestricted emigration of skilled
medical practitioners to Western countries has been allowed
while in India itself there have been less than 3 doctors for every
1 0,000 population compared with more than 15 doctors in Britain
and more than 20 doctors in the USA for every 10,000
population. The problem is resolved in a socialist society through
the predominance of collectivist values over individualistic ones
so that the interests of individuals are not allowed to have priority
over those of a community. There is, therefore, no moral
dilemma for the Soviet Union when presented with requests from
skilled personnel to emigrate. It simply asks whose interests
would be affected and in what ways and then takes the side of the
community.
There are then strong material reasons to account for the
Soviet Union's reluctance to agree to emigration. But it has in no
sense been a closed society. It has received people, mainly
political refugees who would have been unwelcome in the West
or who were actually fleeing from the West. And it has permitted
controlled emigration in order to repatriate people to their
homelands and to re-unify families which were broken up by the
Second World War.
Groups of Koreans moved into Siberia after 1917 in order to
escape Japanese oppression. They have maintained their language
and culture though they are now permanent residents in the
Soviet Union. One such group formed the "Politotdel" collective
farm in 1925, 15 kilometres from Tashkent in Uzbekistan and
they still run it as one of the most successful farm units in the
Soviet Union. Spaniards fled to the Soviet Union during the Civil
War as did many Greeks after their Civil War in 1949. A large
number of Poles fled to the Soviet Union to escape from the
invading German army in 1939. Repatriation agreements were
concluded between the Soviet government and the governments
of Spain, Greece and Poland. The Spanish agreement was
concluded after 1977 because between 1939 and 1977 there were
160
no diplomatic ties between Spain and the Soviet Union. The
Greek repatriation began in 1965 and within about 2 years
between 4,000 and 6,000 Greeks returned to their homeland. The
first agreement covering Poles in the Soviet Union was concluded
in September 1944. This gave individuals of Polish and Jewish
nationality who were Polish citizens on 17 September 1939, the
day the Soviet armies occupied Eastern Poland, the right to
evacuate to Poland. This agreement was implemented during the
first year after the war. A second agreement was signed in March
1957 to assist the voluntary repatriation of those Poles who had
not been able to take advantage of the earlier agreement because
of circumstances beyond their control. A special clause enabled
Jews who had been Polish citizens to return to Poland with their
families and it has been estimated that 25,000 actually left the
USSR for Poland at the time. Altogether about 1 x h million Poles
including about 175,000 Jews, were repatriated in this way.
About 14.000 Armenians who had moved to the Soviet Republic
of Armenia in the years following the Second World War from
the middle East, including Palestine, were allowed to emigrate to
the USA between 1976 and 1980. In most cases this emigration
was to re-unify families. This principle, plus the right to return to
the homeland' were at the basis of an agreement between the
governments of the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of
Germany in 1958 to repatriate the million or so Germans who for
one reason or another resided in the Soviet Union.
All of this emigration was voluntary but none of it was
individual. No person had the right to emigrate outside the terms
of the agreements or without the permission of the Soviet
government which regulated entry into and exit from the Soviet
Union with Statutes passed by the USSR Council of Ministers.
These Statutes made no mention of any nationalities. They were
loosely worded and allowed some scope for administrative
discretion in their application. Those Jews who were not covered
by bilateral agreements had to seek exist visas through the
normal, difficult channels. There was no agreement with Israel.
The Impact of Aggressive Zionism
Israel created a special situation for Jews who wished to
emigrate for it granted them automatic immigration rights. It had
no immigration quotas, no visa formalities for them. Indeed the
state was based on the right of every Jew to emigrate to it. When
161
the first statute on immigration, the Law of Return was h ;
introduced into the Israeli Parliament in 1950 by'the IV-"*
Minister, David Ben Gurion, he said: llTle
'This law does not provide for the State to bestow the
right to settle in Israel upon the Jew living abroad- it
affirms that this right is inherent in him, from the very
fact of his being a Jew. The State does not grant the
right of return to the Jews of the diaspora, This right
preceded the State; this right built the State; its source
is to be found in the historic and never broken
connection between the Jewish people and the
homeland.
The first legislative act of the Israeli Provisional Council of
Mate abolished the mandatory restrictions on Jewish immigration
which the British had imposed. The second was the Law of
Return which spelled out the details behind Ben Gurion's
statement This asserted the right of every Jew to immigrate and
declared that every Jew who expressed the desire to settle in
Israel should receive an immigrant's visa. In practice this meant
that Jews could become Israeli citizens simply by landing in
Israel. The Nationality Amendment Law of 1971 extended this
right to Jews who merely expressed a desire to emigrate to Israel
hut were unable to leave their existing countries. It was expressly
intended for Soviet Jews who were being refused permission to
emigrate to Israel. Thus the Ministry of the Interior in Israel
could grant a Jew Israeli nationality before immigrating. The law
created dual nationality by unilateral action and in the face of
Soviet opposition.
With the creation of Israel, Jewish nationalism turned on all
forces which hampered its growth, in particular those countries
which refused to give Jews the freedom to emigrate as they
wished. It turned, therefore, on the Soviet Union. During Stalin's
time there was no officially endorsed Jewish emigration. Some
Jews left the Soviet Union in the chaos of the post-Second World
War Indeed one of the charges against Jewish intellectuals in
1952 was they had aided and abetted the smuggling of Jews to
Palestine. After 1953 there was a trickle of emigrants wholly for
family re-unification purposes and largely comprising old people.
1 he rate was about 18 per month from 1955 to 1964 It rose to a
monthly average of 150 in the 2'/ 2 years prior to the Six Dav War
in 1967. Jewish emigration was stopped entirely at the end of the
162
Six D a y War an(1 did not really start again until 1971 .
The Six Day War in 1967, in which Israel defeated the
Egyptians and the Syrians, was a catalyst for Jewish emigration,
jt had two main consequences. The Soviet Union had supported
the Arab states. Israel, through its victory, was seen more clearly
tn an hitherto as an instrument of American capitalism, as
America's armed camp in the Middle East. The Soviet Union saw
Zionism as an instrument of the Cold War, a 'fifth column'
operating within its own frontiers, undermining communism. It
turned, in consequence, against any manifestation of Zionism, no
matter how innocent it might have been. Since the brief, transient
endorsement of a Jewish state in 1947, the Soviet Union had
become increasingly aware of Israel's role in international
capitalism. 1967, therefore, was not qualitatively different. It
simply produced a clearer picture.
The second consequence was more dramatic for it was the
resurgence of a confident aggressive Zionism which regarded the
Soviet Union as its main target. There was a revival of Zionist
sentiment among Soviet Jews. There was a more pronounced
expression of what was described as the ""infrastructure of Jewish
unofficial spiritual life in the USSR". Study circles for learning
Hebrew, Jewish literature, music and history, were formed. x In
some areas of the Soviet Union the process of Jewish assimilation
into Soviet life was halted and put in reverse. There were
undoubtedly contradictions in the lives of Soviet Jews which were
sensitive to external pressures. The victory in the Six Day War
touched chords which some Soviet Jews did not know existed.
The Zionist campaign throughout the Western world about the
treatment of Soviet Jewry ensured that they would not be allowed
to forget they were there.
Organizing Emigration
The basic work of providing the media with its copy about
Soviet Jewry was done by Western Jewish intellectuals who
analyzed and reanalyzed every facet of the emigration process,
starting invariably from the assumption that Soviet Jews were
persecuted and. in spite of the evidence, concluding by confirming
the assumption. In the Jewish euphoria following the Six Day
War the Institute of Jewish Affairs in London, in association with
the World Jewish Congress, published the Bulletin on Soviet and
East European Jewish Affairs. This was replaced by Soviet Jewish
163
Affairs in June 1971 to cover "the entiTe range of knowledge
directly or indirectly relevant to an understanding of the position
and prospect of Jews in the USSR and the Communist-governed
countries of Eastern Europe including historical and contextual
aspects." This Journal, published twice yearly, has dealt with "the
Jewish question" ever since. Its first article was "The 'Right to
Leave'"; later ones were "Soviet Jews and Israeli Citizenship",
"New Soviet Laws on Emigration"; "Emigration from the
USSR"; "Freedom of Emigration of Soviet Jewry". The theme of
each issue has remained the same through to 1987. The February
1985 issue was devoted to the proceedings of the "Experts'
Conference on Soviet Jewry" which dealt with "The Jewish
Question in the USSR", "The Emigration of Soviet Jews" and
"Anti-Jewish Discrimination in Education and Employment". In
September, 1986, a new Journal appeared in Britain called the
Journal of the Academic Proceedings of Soviet Jewry with an
academically impressive editorial board. Its pre-publication
publicity stated that its authors should be "Jews resident within
the Soviet Union; or authors of works presented to such persons;
or Jews who, while no longer resident, have undertaken the
work, which is the subject of the contribution, while resident in
the Soviet Union." Its purpose is self-evident. It stated that it
would "chart the circumstances of a highly developed population,
many of whom are constrained against their will ..." All in all
no facets of the lives of Soviet Jewry are nowadays left
unexplored.
Propaganda was intense and highly effective. Small sounds left
the Soviet Union and returned as resonant echoes. 54 Soviet
Jewish protagonists of emigration became household names in
the West as Western governments took up their cases with the
Soviet government. They made the relaxation of restrictions on
Jewish emigration a condition for progress in negotiations over
trade and over arms reduction. The most publicized of the Jewish
emigrants were courted by the President of the USA and the
Prime Minister of Britain. The question of Jewish emigration
from the Soviet Union was converted into a major human rights
issue.
The campaign was not simply to convince the world that Soviet
Jews suffered from discrimination but to persuade Soviet Jews to
emigrate and for this reason it was taken into the Soviet Union.
Western radio stations, for example the BBC and the Voice of
America, conveyed Western perceptions about Israeli and Soviet
164
affairs to Soviet listeners. Radio Liberty in West Germany
specialized in broadcasting material critical of the Soviet Union.
The most important part, however, was played by the Voice of
Israel whose contribution was described as follows:
"While the Israelis were absent from the Soviet Union
after 1967. the Voice of Israel was instrumental in
helping Soviet Jews affirm their positive identification
with Israel, The impact of the Voice of Israel . . . was
certainly important ... It was perhaps the only radio
station outside the USSR that contributed to an
important socio-political movement within the Soviet
Union. The Voice of Israel was widely heard by diverse
groups of Soviet Jews." 55
Zionist dissident groups were formed both to communicate
with the West and to translate its propaganda into internal
political action. They linked with other dissident groups and used
similar methods to publicize their case, such as letters of protest
to leading members of the government and the Communist Party
and for publication in the West. In the autumn of 1969 when the
Israeli government began its widely publicized campaign for the
free emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel, Mrs Golda Meir, the
Prime Minister of Israel, publicized one such letter signed by 18
Jews in Georgia while Israel's Permanent Representative at the
United Nations presented it to a press conference in New York.
The Zionist groups organized the transition from individual to
collective protest. They distributed clandestinely produced political
journals which Russian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian emigre pub-
lishing houses, daily newspapers, literary and political journals
then published in the West. The US government financed Radio
Liberty in Munich employed a research staff to collect every scrap
of this "Samizdat" or self-published material and collate it in a
"Samizdat Archive". Since 1972 the processed contents of the
Archive have been available in four American and four European
Libraries, including the Library of Congress in Washington and
the British Museum in London. Radio Liberty has published its
own research papers and has become a major source of critical
data. Thus, whatever the motives of the writers of the "Samizdat"
material, it has been used in the West for anti-Soviet purposes.
Propaganda was one arm of the Zionist campaign. The other
was a network of institutional support for the actual emigration of
Soviet Jews, A number of Western Jewish organizations such as
165
the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress
the World Jewish Congress and the National Council for Soviet
Jewry, provided material assistance. In Israel, the Ministry of
Immigrant Absorption and the Jewish Agency, with its own
network of international representatives, performed major co-
ordinating functions. The main link between the source of
immigrants and Israel has been provided by the Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). This body has dealt only with
those who were registered as Jews in their internal passports.
Other Jews and non-Jews who wished to emigrate with Israeli
visas have been assisted by the International Rescue Committee
and the Tolstoy Foundation. At the diplomatic level in Moscow
the question of Jewish exit visas has been handled since 1967 by
the Dutch Embassy which represents Israeli interests in the
Soviet Union in the absence of normal diplomatic relations. The
final say was had by the Department for Visas and Registrations
of the Ministry of Interior of the USSR (OVIR), which
distributes emigration visas.
The Soviet Union has remained consistent in its approach to
emigration by being opposed to emigration as such but in favour
of repatriation to a homeland and the re-unification of families.
As Israel was not recognized as a homeland for Soviet citizens the
only recourse Soviet Jews had was to seek re-unification with
families in Israel. For this purpose, they were required to supply
an affidavit, received by post from a relative in Israel, which was
an invitation confirming the family relationship. This vyzov was
supplied by the Jewish Agency on request. Many Jewish families
had been scattered by the war and Nazi occupation and some, in
its aftermath, were distributed between the USSR and Eastern
Europe on the one hand and Israel and the USA on the other.
There were genuine reasons for re-unification.
Family re-unification was not a clear-cut issue for most of those
who wished to emigrate to join families were leaving families
behind. The Soviet authorities, conscious of the situation, stated
their attitude as follows:
"We are in favour of families being re-united, but not
infrequently we are faced with a situation in which the
wish of some persons to leave the country in order to be
"re-united with relatives" actually leads to the disintegra-
tion of existing families and relations between relatives:
children leave parents, parents leave children, husbands
166
divorce wives and vice-versa. How should we act in
such cases? Naturally, we protect in the first place, the
interests of Soviet citizens who are remaining in the
country. It is not easy to find the right criterion of
objectivity and justice in settling such complicated and
delicated questions . . Z' 56
In an attempt to ensure family unity, applicants for emigration
visas were compelled, wherever possible, to get parental per-
mission. But matters did not always work out to everyone's
benefit. In the early rush for visas after 1969 OVTR officials bent
the rules and showed the recipients of vyzovs how to explain the
relationship between themselves and the Israeli names on their
invitations. 57 Until 1978 the closeness of the kinship relationship
was not important. Then OVIR officials were instructed to insist
that the relationship should be close. Yet despite the various
precautions husbands left wives and children, wives left husbands
and parents and went with children alone. Many thousands of
families were divided.
The Soviet Union responded to the Western pressures for the
emigration of Soviet Jews in two ways. It counter-attacked with
extensive and detailed criticisms of Zionism in the Soviet media
and it permitted an increasing number of Soviet Jews to emigrate
with Israeli visas. Anti-Zionist comments in the Soviet Union
were, of course, not new but from 1970 they increased in
intensity and quality. Many Soviet Jews criticized Zionism in such
newspapers as Fravda, Izvestia, Trud and Republic papers such
as Pravda Ukraine, Sovetskaya Moldavia and the Zarya Vostaka
from Georgia. There was no uniformity in the reactions of either
newspapers or writers. Some condemned Zionism and compared
it with Nazism while others simply pointed out the benefits of living
under socialism. Typical of the latter was the statement by an
economist, Grigoriy Dzeventsky, on Tashkent television in
March 1971. He said: "I am a Candidate of Economic Sciences;
my sister is an engineer, a leading expert in one of the larger
Moscow planning projects; her husband is a lieutenant colonel;
my brother is an engineer and has an advanced degree in the
technological sciences; his wife is a chemist; another brother is an
electrician; his wife is an agronomist. My wife is a jurist. One
cannot help asking what kind of defence our family is in need
of? 5 *
Anti-Semitism is a crime in the Soviet Union so there were no
167
public anti-Semitic responses. The official reaction, as expressed
in leading articles and editorials, was based in part on the
contributions Jews had made to the development and defence of
the Soviet Union and in part on a class analysis of Zionism as a
form of nationalism which was no different from other national-
isms, including national socialism, in its performance as a
doctrine of the bourgeoisie. A catalogue of Israeli acts from the
Suez crisis in 1956 onwards showed it to practise militaristic
imperialism, creating colonies out of Arab lands and carrying out
racist policies with regards to Arabs. Israel was equated with
South Africa.
The number of Jewish emigrants increased dramatically during
the 1970s. From 1968 till 1982, 648,072 invitations to re-unite with
families in Israel were received by Soviet Jews. Thus almost one-
third of the total Jewish population received vyzovs and could,
therefore, apply for exit visas. 381,700 of these, representing 58.9
per cent, did not use them for one reason or another. Altogether,
262,377 Jews left with visas for Israel in that period. At the
beginning the movement was slow to take off even though the
Jewish Agency sent out 27,301 vyzovs in 1969. It was not until
1971 when the full effects of the Zionist campaign within the
Soviet Union were felt that emigration rose significantly. It
remained at a high level until 1979 after which it tailed off to
below the 1969 level. The signs were that the Zionist campaign
had largely exhausted itself by the end of the decade. The
following table shows the annual rate of emigration.
The Pattern of Emigration
The extent and pattern of Soviet Jewish emigration in the 1970s
raised many questions, some of them contradictory. Why, in the
first instance would so many Jews want to leave the Soviet
Union? Why, on the other hand, did many Jews refuse to apply
for visas after having received family invitations to go to Israel?
Why were there changes in all of the indices in 1974, in particular
in the refusal to settle in Israel. All of the people enumerated in
the above table left the Soviet Union for Vienna with Israeli
visas. Yet after 1974 the majority of them became what the
Israelis called "drop-outs"; that is they changed their minds about
their ultimate destination when they arrived at the Vienna
reception centre. Why should Israel which started the agitation
over Soviet Jewry become so unpopular with them? Each of these
168
TABLE II
JEWISH EMIGRATION FROM THE USSR 1968-1984 59
% WHO
% OF VYZOVS
NO. OF
REFUSED TO GO
NO. OF
ACTUALLY
YEAR EMIGRANTS
TO ISRAEL
VYZOVS
USED
(i)
(")
(ill)
(lv)
( v )
1968
229
0
6,786
3.4
1969
2,979
0
27,301
10.9
1970
1,027
0
4,830
21.3
1971
13,022
0.5
40,794
31.9
1 ATI
1972
31,681
0.8
67,895
46.7
1973
34,733
4.2
58,216
59.7
1974
20,628
18.8
42,843
48.1
1975
13,221
37.3
34.145
38.7
1976
14,261
49.1
36,104
39.5
1977
16,736
J\). I
hj,{)jZ
3o.y
1978
28,865
58.4
107,212
26.9
1979
51,333
66.3
128.891
39.8
1980
21,471
65.6
32,335
66.4
1981
9,449
80.6
10,922
86.5
1982
2,688
3,159
85.1
1983
1,314
1,530
85.9
1984
896
1,140
78.6
questions is reflected in the statistics. The answers clarify the
whole issue of Soviet Jewry.
The desire to emigrate varied widely between the Republics.
The greatest interest was shown by the non-Ashkenazi Jews,
described as Georgian Jews, Bukharans and Mountain Jews,
whose Jewishness was expressed through their religion. They had
lived in the Soviet Union since its creation but had retained a
distinct sense of being Jewish. For them the final voyage was to
Israel. Between 1968 and 1980 almost 20 per cent more Jews than
were registered as such in Georgia received vyzovs and almost 60
per cent of them actually emigrated. In Azerbaidzhan and
Tadzhikistan where non-Ashkenazis also lived the interest in
emigration was high though the picture there is complicated by
the fact that half of the Soviet Central Asian Jews were
Ashkenazis who had migrated from the West during and after the
169
Second World War. The victory in the Six Day War and the
Israeli campaign which followed it had an immediate impact on
the non-Ashkenazis. They made up a substantial part of the flow
from 1971 to 1974. Emigrating to Israel for them was not a
rejection of the Soviet Union but a fulfilment of a prophesy.
Most of the remaining emigrants came from areas at the
periphery of the Soviet Union which became part of that country
during the Second World War. The areas were Lithuania, Latvia
and parts of the Ukraine, Moldavia and Byelorussia. Although
they did not express their Jewishness with the intensity of the
non-Ashkenazis they were the least assimilated, and the most
restless among Soviet Jews. Their experience of socialism had
been relatively brief and they lived among a gentile population
which had not been educated out of all of its racial prejudices. By
the early 1970s they had been long enough away from the pre-war
ghettos to forget them but not long enough under socialism to
realize its benefits. The Israeli campaign provided an escape
route for them.
The areas least affected by the call to emigrate were the three
Slav Republics which had been in the Soviet Union since the
beginning, namely the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Russian
Federation. Most of the emigrants from the Ukraine and
Byelorussia came from parts annexed from Poland during the
war. There was virtually no interest shown in emigration by the
Ashkenazis Jews in the heartland of the Soviet Union. This is
shown by the fact that only 13.8 per cent of the Jewish population
of the RSFSR received vyzovs between 1968 and 1980 while only
4.4 per cent actually emigrated. The distribution of vyzovs and
the extent of emigration from the various republics is shown in
Table III
It is clear that anti-Semitism as a generalised form of
discrimination was not responsible for this emigration. In
Georgia, with the highest rate of emigration, there were not even
rumours of anti-Semitism. Jews in the periphery, some still with
memories of ghettos and the holocaust may have identified some
aspects of socialist planning as discriminatory. The illusory
freedom of ghetto life had gone. They were living in a collectivist
society where the practice of nationalism in whatever form was
discouraged. But none of this caused them to rank anti-Semitism
as a significant factor in causing emigration. 62 The propaganda
about Soviet anti-Semitism aroused Western Jews but not Soviet
ones for they knew better. Moreover, if anti-Semitism was as
170
TABLE III
SOVIET JEWISH EMIGRATION BY REPUBLIC
1968- 1980*°
VYZOVS
EMIGRANTS
% OF
% OF JEWISH
NO. OF
JEWISH
POPULATION
REPUBLIC
VYZOVS
POPULATION
NUMBER
I M nUDl IDI Tr
IN KtrUol^K,
vjeorgia
66,144
ny.3
Lithuania
13,868
58.7
11615
49.2
Latvia
20,334
55.4
13153
35.8
Moldavia
50,926
51.9
27376
27.9
Tadzhikistan
7,760
53.1
2981
20.4
Azerbaidzhan
29,501
71.4
7244
17.5
Uzbekistan
46J73
45.5
16247
15.8
Ukraine
246,571
31.7
91656
11.8
Byelorussia
31,220
21.0
10469
7.1
RSFSR
111,821
13.8
35702
4.4
prevalent as the Western media maintained, why then did the
majority of those who received family invitations from Israel
refuse to emigrate? Zionist writers have claimed that this was so
because the Soviet government restricted emigration by imposing
quotas for each Republic but there were no quotas. 95 per cent of
all visa applicants in the 1970s were successful.
The unsuccessful ones were called 'refuseniks' and their plight
was widely publicized in the West. Some had waited for 10 or
more years for a visa and by 1985 it was claimed that more than
8,000 names had accumulated on the 'refusenik 1 list. The reasons
for failing to obtain a visa were because the applicants were
involved in secret work, or were engaged in a major branch of the
military, or were under investigation, or had failed in some way
to comply with the regulations. About 25 to 30 per cent of the
'refuseniks' received visas each year but some could never qualify
and bore a perpetual grudge against the Soviet authorities which
was exploited by the Western advocates of free Soviet emigration.
There is a big step between receiving an invitation from Israel
and taking the decision to emigrate. Some of the vyzovs were
unsolicited. The Jewish agencies were keen to involve as many
171
Soviet Jews as possible in the emigration process and took the
initiative in sending out invitations. The women's Zionist
organization in the USA, Hadassa, for instance, systematically
set about collecting the names and addresses of Soviet Jews. It
was not difficult to find namesakes in Israel to establish vague
family relationships. Hadassa then sent vyzovs to a large number
of unsuspecting Soviet Jews who had never thought of emigration
and who presumably destroyed their invitations. The ones who
had sought the invitations had to weigh the costs and advantages
of emigration. The first flow of emigrants consisted mainly of
Zionists. After that the reasons were mainly material. The
advantages, therefore, had to be expressed in terms of ease of
settlement, the provision of jobs, opportunities for material
advancement. Even the Georgian Jews were discouraged by
letters complaining of absorption difficulties. There was a
growing reluctance by recent immigrants to accommodate new
immigrants, a phenomenon common in American history. New
immigrants engaged in mounting protests about their treatment.
Israeli bureacuracy, it was alleged, was worse than that in the
Soviet Union. There were house shortages, job shortages and a
high rate of inflation. Then from 1973 there was the realization
that Israel was a dangerous place in which to live. The euphoria
following the Six Day War disappeared entirely after the fourth
Arab-Tsraeli conflict, the Yom Kippur War, which began in
October 1973. This war was expensive in lives and equipment and
inconclusive in its results. Israel was shown to be vulnerable to
attack. The deployment of new technology against tanks and
aircraft made sure that the days of quick victories, as in the Six
Day War, were over. Israel's future wars were going to be
prolonged and total. It was not an attractive proposition for
would-be Soviet emigrants.
The Yom Kippur War had a dramatic impact on the flow of
emigrants to Israel. Its immediate effect was to divert the
emigrants to the USA. All Soviet Jewish emigrants left with
Israeli visas, travelled to Vienna where they entered a reception
camp and became the responsibility of the Hebrew Immigrant
Aid Society, HIAS provided subsistence, arranged and financed
transport and handed out wages so that the emigrants could ease
themselves relatively painlessly into the new society. It was a
highly organised and well-endowed operation involving few of
the hardships which earlier emigrants to other societies had had
to endure.
172
From 1973 there was a notable increase in the number of
people who decided in Vienna that they would prefer to travel on
to the USA. HIAS, with finance from New York Jewry, was able
to meet the cost of this change of plans. The US government
facilitated it by granting refugee status to all Soviet Jewish
emigrants. In American eyes the emigrants were emigres. The
annual rate of "drop-outs" is illustrated clearly in the following
table:
TABLE IV
DESTINATION OF SOVIET JEWISH EMIGRANTS
BY PERIOD 63
PERIOD
ISRAEL
ELSEWHERE
% GOING
ELSEWHERE
1968-1973
82,211
1,765
2.1
1974-1975
25,347
8,807
25.8
1976-1979
45,433
66,410
59.4
1980-1984
10,861
25,208
69.9
1968-1984
163,852
102,190
38.4
The emigrants, on arriving in Vienna, gave a number of
reasons for changing their minds. It was, they said, the climate, a
fear of war, apprehension about Israeli's future, general absorption
difficulties and, in the later, part of the decade, a desire to re-
unite with families in the USA, though it was noted that "the
'drop-outs 1 often attempt to 'send' their old and ailing parents to
Israel, while they themselves aim for the USA, Canada, Australia
or Germany.' 164 The Jews who emigrated after 1974 were
increasingly the highly qualified residents of the main Soviet
cities, who were simply seeking to acquire the life-styles of
Western intellectual society. From 63 per cent to 85 per cent of all
the emigrants from Kharkov. Odessa, Kiev, Leningrad, Minsk
and Moscow between 1968 and 1980 were 'drop-outs . The
essential character of the process was revealed by one of the
emigrants in 1978, a 37 year old head of a scientific laboratory in
Novosibirsk in Western Siberia. He went abroad to read a paper
at a conference. When he returned he asked at his laboratory
'"When can I go abroad again?" and was told "In four or five
years". He said "Suddenly T understood profoundly what Pavlov
173
meant when he spoke of their 1 reflex of* freedom': that craving for
unrestrained movement without which humans in particular
become bored and depressed. I was bored by the passport
system, the impossibility of changing one's place of residence or
travelling abroad, by the Soviet way of life in general. Anti-
Semitism was not a factor in my decision to emigrate."
From the Soviet point of view, the "drop-outs' changed the
character of the emigration process from one to • facilitate
repatriation and re-unite families to straight-forward emigration.
Some Zionists felt that this threatened the possibility of Soviet
Jews emigrating to Israel in the future and put pressure on the
HIAS to stop financing "drop-outs". The Soviet government,
however, took no action to stop the flow. Emigration dried up at
its source as the figures given above show. In Lithuania, for
instance, there was not one application for an exit visa in 1985, w '
In fact by then the process was beginning to reverse. It
was reported from the USA that there was a "'continuous upswing
in the numbers of Soviet Jews leaving Israel. ,,f "' This was part of a
general movement from Israel. In 1981-82,33.000 people entered
Israel while 45.000 left it. The latest development is for Jews to
return to the Soviet Union, dissatisfied with all Western options.
This movement back is difficult. First, those who have received
financial assistance from Jewish emigration agencies on the way
out have to repay it before they are allowed to leave for the
Soviet Union. Many emigrants have been unable to do this.
Secondly there is no organization to facilitate the return. There is
no resettlement camp in Vienna to arrange for finance and
documents so the returnees live and work as best they can in a
neighbourhood of Vienna. There is delay at the Soviet end for the
Jews who wish to return home have to re-apply for Soviet
citizenship which they renounced when they left. Nonetheless
Jews are returning in small but increasing numbers.
The Dialectics of the Jewish Question
The Soviet Jewish question is both complex and contradictory.
The issue as formulated in the West is that Soviet Jews, by being
refused the right to leave the Soviet Union, are being prevented
from escaping from unacceptable, discriminatory treatment.
They are, therefore, denied an inalienable right to leave and re-
enter their country freely. This is an infringement of a basic
human right, founded on 'natural law\ The right to leave' is put
174
next in priority to the 'right to life' itself, and at the heart of all
other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. The
Western advocates of the "right to leave' refer to the United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endorsed in the
autumn of 1948, which stated "Everyone has the right to leave
any country, including his own. and to return to his country ". The
issue was elaborated and endorsed by a United Nations Report in
1963 called "The Study of Discrimination in Respect of the Right
of Everyone to Leave Any Country, Including His Own and to
Return to His Country. " This Report regarded the 'right to leave'
as a constituent element of personal liberty. Further United
Nations' declarations were made in 1965 and 1966 concerning the
right of a person to leave any country. By 1970 it was clearly
enshrined in international law.
The 'right to leave 1 as perceived by the United Nations was
never absolute but subject to reasonable and necessary restrictions
to protect national security, public order, public health or morals,
or the rights and freedoms of others. In capitalist societies these
considerations are generally theoretically subordinate to the
freedom of an individual to choose. Indeed under capitalism the
major moral issue is the freedom of choice. The 'right to leave' is
a facet of this. The United Nations Declarations, by giving pre-
eminence to the 'right to leave", were simply, therefore,
reiterating individualism as the core value.
In socialist societies where collective considerations are para-
mount, individual rights are derived ones, conditional upon the
protection of community interests. A United Nations of Socialist
Societies would alter the format of a Declaration of Human
Rights by reversing the emphasis on individual and collective
rights. There would be no natural right to leave, only the facility
to emigrate on compassionate grounds such as repatriation and
re-uniting families. That has been the practice of the Soviet
Union.
Enunciating the "right to leave" as a principle at this period of
history is not fortuitous but to support the practice of international
capitalism. It has been done in defiance of the individual interests
of many Soviet Jews who have been used as pawns in the Cold
War struggle to preserve the hegemony of capitalism. The linch pin
in this particular struggle is the existence of the Zionist state.
Israel, perpetually and virtually totally indebted to US financial
interests. There is now a homeland to which Jews can be directed
and which is eager to accept them. If there were no homeland
175
there would be no Jewish question, except for committed Zionists
seeking a homeland. There was no Jewish question on the
agendas of governments before 1945 when ghettos and the
holocaust dominated Jewish lives in Europe, when anti-Semitism
was real and bitter. Even after Israel had been formed there was
not really a Jewish question until it felt sufficiently strong and
confident to project its Zionist philosophy. The existence of
Israel was a necessary condition for the Soviet Jewish question
but Zionism was the catalyst.
The Soviet treatment of Jews was not a causal factor in the
emigration process. In the period between 1948 and 1953 when
there was some discrimination against Jewish intellectuals there
was condemnation from the West but no Soviet Jewish question.
The question appeared when Soviet Jews had recovered from
those setbacks and were benefiting from the post-war reconstruc-
tion in the country as a whole. As figures shown earlier in this
chapter indicate, Jews were a relatively privileged group at the
end of the 1960s. The issue of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union
arose as a major issue in the West to meet the needs of an
aggressive Israeli nationalism after 1967. Indeed anti-Semitism is
a corollary of Israeli nationalism. Nation-creating tendencies
amongst a scattered people require a perception of the world
outside as inferior, hostile and unsatisfactory. Once the Zionist
flag began to be waved by Israel there were bound to be
accusations of discrimination against Jews outside otherwise the
waving was without meaning.
It was equally inevitable that the accusations should be directed
at the Soviet Union, There were approximately 2 million Jews
there without the freedom to emigrate and subject to powerful
assimilating tendencies which were the antithesis of Zionism.
There could never be any compatability between socialism which
unites on a class basis and a nationalism which is based on
religion. This, of course, was one reason for Israel's pre-
occupation with Soviet Jewry. Israel's case was taken up by the
Western world, however for a different reason. It was a case
which could be used to defame the Soviet Union. The Soviet
Jewish question was quickly recognized as an instrument of anti-
Sovietism. It turned out to be highly effective.
Once the issue became a part of Cold War politics then Soviet
Jews lost their identities as people and became political pawns.
They could be moved at the whim of the player. Their own
personal interests disappeared from sight. Many Soviet Jews were
176
unwittingly sucked into the emigration process by the sheer
weight of propaganda and Jewish social pressure. For many of
them this created personal tragedies. Although emigration
allowed relatively wide kinship groups to unite it frequently
shattered nuclear families. The images which many had of life in
the West were illusory. Absorptive problems were difficult. From
being highly qualified intellectuals in the Soviet Union they
became unskilled lower middle class workers in the USA. Ninety
per cent of Soviet emigrant doctors failed to obtain American
qualifications to practice/ 1 * In comparison with urban Soviet life,
Israeli society was closed and uncultured whereas America was
dominated by small-town materialism. The new immigrants
quickly acquired cars but lost much which gave life substance.
The letters to Soviet kin from emigrants revealed much unhappi-
ness. To that has to be added the unhappiness of deserted wives,
children and husbands. None of this mattered to the purveyors of
anti-Sovietism.
Unfortunately, the Western Jews who campaigned so vigorously,
and often in all innocence, also treated Soviet Jews as pawns. For
the ordinary participants it was the campaign which mattered
whereas for the organizers in the higher echelons of World Jewry
the primary issue w r as the survival of Israel. It was logical that
organized Jewry should support the Israeli campaign. They did so
by financing the emigration process, by organizing agitations
against the Soviet Union and by raising the issue constantly as a
major human rights violation. They nurtured Israel so carefully
that any criticism against it was construed an anti-Semitic. When
the Soviet Union was criticized for its human rights record,
nothing was said about the Israeli treatment of Palestinian Arabs
or about the methods of control used in the administered*
territories. Yet Israel's own human rights record was infamous. Tt
expropriated Arab land, destroyed Arab homes and property,
denied them rights of citizenship and used arrests, interrogations
and imprisonment as common methods of control. The Defence
Committee for Palestinian Detainees claimed in the early 1980s
that 500 people were arrested every month, of whom 85 per cent
were released soon afterwards. 6 '" 1 Demonstrations by Arabs were
suppressed. "A report of the International Federation of Human
Rights, drawn up after a mission carried out between 26 August
and 7 September 1982 in the Occupied Territories mentions that
"in a recent period 31 persons were killed by bullets, and 586
were wounded, 251 of them by bullets in the course of
177
demonstrations on the public streets." 70 The Israelis used
expulsion from the country as a punishment for Palestinian
Arabs. More than 30 Arabs were expelled in an 18 months period
after June 1985. 71 The catalogue of human rights violations by
Israel in the Lebanon is long and detailed. Constraints on the
'right to leave' seem minor and insignificant by comparison, yet
the comparison is never made by Western Jewish critics of the
Soviet Union.
The Western campaign for the emigration of Soviet Jewry has
regenerated anti-Semitism. The failure to differentiate between
Jewishness on the one hand and Zionism and Israel on the other
has got the lines crossed. Whenever criticisms of Israeli foreign
policy are described as anti-Semitic then non-Jews tend to
identify Israeli behaviour with Jewishness rather than to see it as
a consequence of bourgeois nationalism. The description of
Soviet criticisms of Zionism as anti-Semitic have a similar
consequence. Thus Jewishness is highlighted as a variable in
situations where it plays no part. Similarly, the nation-building
propaganda of Israel focusses attention on all Jews as potential
adherents of Zionism so that the critics of Zionism become
suspicious of the loyalties of Jews. This attracts attention to Jews
not because of what they do or say but because of their
nationality and this is basically racist. It is inevitable that
questions will be asked of Jews in the Soviet Union after the
massive campaign to persuade all Jews that their allegiance lies
with Israel. Where do their loyalties lie? To what extent can trust
be put in them? These questions raise no problems in capitalist
societies for Zionism is consistent with capitalist philosophy. But
to proclaim it in a socialist society is to challenge socialist
legitimacy. For this reason Zionists have sometimes been
punished for engaging in anti-state activities. In this way the
Jewish question became linked to the entirely separate issue of
dissent in the Soviet Union which was discussed in the previous
chapter.
FOOTNOTES
1 . Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy by Victor Zaslavsky
and Robert J Brym, London, 1983, p. 9.
2. ibid, pp. 9-10.
3. Quoted from The Jews and other National Minorities under the Soviets by
Avrahm Yarmolinsky, New York, 1928, p. 48,
4. Zaslavsky and Brym, opcit, pp. 11-12.
5. ibid.
178
6. Soviet Communism; A New Civilization? by S & B Webb, London. 1935,
p. 152.
7. ibid, p. 153.
8. Zaslavsky and Brym, opcit, p. 17.
9. Soviet but not Russian by William Mandel, California, 1985, p. 320.
10. The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg, Chicago, 1961, p.
187. Hcydrich was assassinated in Prague in 1942 and the inhabitants of
Lidice were massacred as a reprisal.
11. ibid, p. 192.
12. Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution by Isaiah Trunk, a compilation of
memoirs bv survivors. New York, 1979, p. 40.
13. ibid.
14. ibid.
15. Hilberg. opcit, p. 197.
16. See The Abandonment of the Jews. America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945
by David S Wyman, New York, 1984, pp. 19-30.
17. Quoted in The Holocaust Denial by Gill Scidcl, 1986, p. xiv.
18. ibid, p. xv.
19. Wyman, opcit, p. 6.
20. Scidcl, op cit, p. xv.
21. Wyman, opcit, p. 8.
22. Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-45 by Bernard Wasserstcin, Oxford,
1979.
23. Seidel, op cit, p. xvi.
24. Wasserstcin, op cit, p. 346. It was estimated that 3000 had been admitted
between 1933 and 1939 (ibid p. 28).
25. ibid, p. 19.
26. ibid, p. 20.
27. ibid.
28. Auschwitz and the Allies by Martin Gilbert, London, 1981 .
29. Wyman, op cit, pp. 8-9.
30. ibid, pp. x-xi.
31. ibid, p. 136.
32. Quoted from Cabinet Minutes, 16 May, 1945, by Wasserstcin, op cit, p. 131.
33. Quoted in Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 15, No 1 , p. 18.
34. Quoted in Soviet But Not Russian by William Mandel, p. 326.
35 . Quoted i n So Viet Jewish A f fairs, Vol 1 5 , No 1, p . 1 9 .
36. See "Jews in the 1979 Soviet Census: Initial Data" by Mordechai
Altshuler, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 10, No 3, 1980. pp. 6-7.
37. Source: "The Jews in the 1979 Soviet Census: Initial Data" by Mordechai
Altshuler, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 10, No 3, 1980, p. 9. Data for 3 of the
Republics, covering 2 per cent of the country's Jews was not published.
38. Quoted from Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, p. 13.
39. Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy, op cit, pp. 25-26.
40. ibid, p. 15.
41 . 'The Silent Majority" by T Fricdgut, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 10, No 2,
May 1980, p. 6."
42. Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, p. 12.
43. ibid, pp. '13-14.
44. ibid, p. 13.
179
45. Sec '-A Periodization of Soviet Policy Towards the Jews" by Willhm
Orbach , Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 1 2 , No 3 , p. 58.
46 p^ms nt Ma ' 0nty by T Fried 8*»t, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 10, No 2
47. "A Note on Jewish Membership of the Soviet Communist Patty* bv
Everett M Jacobs, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 6, No 2. 1976. pp. 3 14-1 15
1979 S an 4 9 Emigration " by Ig0r Birmat1 • s ^iet Jewish Affairs, Vol 9, No 2.
49. My Russia, p. 165.
50. Soviet but not Russian, op cit, p. 307.
51 ' 1982 5 m ' 8rari ° n " by Z Nezer - Sovie1 }ewlsh A ff a '^ v °l «2. No 3. Nov
52. Quoted in -Soviet Jews and Israeli Citizenship: The Nationality Amendment
Law ot 1971 by Leonard Schrocter. Soviet Jewish Affain No ?
November 1971. '
53. Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, p. 43.
54. This was how Jonathan Frankcl say the situation from a 7ioni st
No'? m " Th ° Ami " Zionist Prcss Campaigns". Soviet Jewish Affairs,
55. Quoted by Zaslavsky and Brym. op cit, p 38
56. Quoted by G Ginsburg in "New Soviet Laws on Emigration^. Sam
Jewish Affairs, Vol 6, No 2, 1976, p. 9.
57. Zaslavsky and Brym , op cit, p. 134.
58. Soviet Jewish Affairs, No 3, May 1972, p. 15.
59. Compiled from sources in Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 11, No 2, p, 16 and
Vol 15, No 2, p. 42.
60. Soviet Jewish Affairs, May, 1981 , pp. 1 1-12.
61. This figure is over 100 per cent because 19.3 per cent more than the
registered number of Jews in Georgia received vyzovs
62. In a survey of emigrants only 5.3-6.0 per cent said thev had suffered
directly from discrimination. See "Emigration and Identity" bv B Pinkus
Soviet Jewish Affairs, November, 1985, p. 13.
63. Soviet Jewish Affairs, November. 1985 p 20
64. ibid. May 1981, pp. 16-17.
65. Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit. p. 56.
66. Soviet Weekly, 14 December, 1985, p. 10.
67. Soviet Jewish Affairs, November. 1985 p ?4
68. ibid. p. 27n.
69. Israel and Palestine. Human Rights in hrael and in the Occupied
Territories, END Papers, 9 Winter, 1984-5 n ^0
70. ibid, p. 27,
71. The Guardian, 13 November. 1986.
180
Chapter Seven
The Human Rights Issue
Whenever Britain and the USA comment about human rights
in the Soviet Union it is always with reference only to political
rights. Yet whenever the issue of 'human rights' has been debated
internationally a much wider and socially relevant definition has
been used. The United Nations, for instance, flung the net wide
and considered that human rights were infringed through internal
state oppression, fascism, colonialism, racism, apartheid and
genocide on the one hand and by the denial of a range of social,
economic and cultural rights such as the right to work, to
adequate subsistance, education, health care, protection in old
age and the right to speak the indigenous language, on the other.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the
United Nations on 10 December, 1948, covered the right to life,
to work, to support when unemployed, to fair and favourable
working conditions, to social security, to medical care and to
education as well as to political rights. Experience in the histories
of all countries and in the contemporary lives of Third World
countries has shown that political rights are mere gestures if
people are denied the right to work and, therefore, to subsis-
tance. The freedom to speak her mind is little consolation to a
starving woman. Economic rights are a precondition for permanent,
effective political freedom. The causal link runs from the
economic base to every facet of freedom for if there is not
equality through the social relations of production there cannot
be equality anywhere else. The primacy of economic rights,
however, is not asserted in a mechanistic way but through a
dialectical process so that different facets of freedom interact and
influence each other. If one facet is missing then the others must
be marred. There may be short-run situations when the causal
process is reversed as in present day South Africa where blacks
need political freedom in order to break apartheid and extend
their economic rights. But in the long-run the quality of their
political freedom will be determined by the extent of their
181
economic rights. If South African blacks achieve universal
suffrage but remain as employees to white employers then their
achievements will indeed be limited.
The Soviet Union has its own historically determined pattern of
freedom. By abolishing private property it has eliminated
structural economic inequality. It specifies and guarantees the
rights which flow from this through a written code in its Constitu-
tion. Thus a whole series of economic, social and cultural rights
are ensured by the Constitution and backed by the force of law.
They fall into three categories which are symbolised by the right
to work, the rights of women and ethnic equality.
The Right to Work
This has a high priority in Soviet society and is enshrined in
Article 40 of the Constitution which states: ' Citizens of the USSR
have the right to work (that is, to guarantee employment and pay
in accordance with the quantity and quality of their work, and not
below the state-established minimum), including the right to
choose their trade or occupation, type of job and work in
accordance with their inclinations, abilities, training and education,
with due account of the needs of the society." The guarantee of
such an important right carries responsibilities. Soviet people
have an obligation to contribute to society by working, following
the precept laid down by Lenin that those who do not work shall
not eat. The emphasis on the right to work arose out of the
experience of instability and insecurity in capitalist labour
markets. The accompanying obligation to work has its basis in the
collectivist ethic of Soviet society which imposes on everyone of
working age, without exception, the responsibility to contribute
to the general welfare of the society.
The ability of the Soviet Union to fulfil this Constitutional
obligation has been hampered by the enormity of the economic
and social problems which followed the Revolution. The devasta-
tion caused by the Civil War and the Allied intervention to topple
the Soviet government and the ensuing economic blockage bv
international capitalism, plus the internal divisions between
industrial workers and the peasants and between the rich and
poor peasant, created almost overwhelming difficulties for a
decade and a half. In 1922 it was estimated that there were half a
million registered unemployed but this figure was swollen by the
movement of population from the countryside to the towns in
182
search of work. By 1926 the registered unemployed had risen to 1
million while the actual figure was at least two million. 1 This
situation continued despite the reduction of the working day to
seven hours and the introduction of multiple shift working. The
incidence of unemployment was only alleviated after the applica-
tion of the First Five Year Plan in 1929 which generated wide-
spread constructional work. At the end of that Plan the problem
of unemployment gave way to a problem of labour scarcity and
this has remained the case ever since.
The position in contemporary Soviet society is that industrial
change is planned in a balanced fashion so that where redundancies
occur, for whatever reason, they can be compensated for by
alternative job opportunities. A factory, mill or mine cannot be
closed without provisions for alternative work, nor can new
technology be introduced unless the employment prospects of
workers affected by it have been protected. No manager can
dismiss a worker without the sanction of the local trade union
committee and even with that the worker has to be provided with
another job. In effect most dismissals result in workers being
transferred from one job to another within the same production
unit.
Conditions of employment are governed by a highly detailed
Labour Code which is legally binding. Every contingency is
provided for under the Code in order to protect the interests of
workers. Each worker signs a labour agreement whereby "the
person employed undertakes to do work in a definite trade
speciality or in some other capacity in conformity with internal
regulations," Article 12 adds that "The Administrative cannot
demand that the factory worker or office employee do work
which is not stipulated in the labour agreement." Workers cannot
be transferred (Article 13) "to another job at the same enterprise,
institution or organization, to another enterprise, institution or
organization, or to a different locality, even if the enterprise
institution or organization is moved there" without the consent of
the person concerned, except under very stringent and limited
cicumstances concerning breaches of labour discipline . A worker
can cancel a labour agreement after giving two weeks* notice but
an enterprise can only do so for reasons stipulated in the Code
and with the prior agreement of the local trade union committee.
If management acts outside this agreement then a worker is
legally protected.
The practical application of the Labour Code produces some
183
underemployment and causes some enterprises to carry surplus
labour. It may retard the pace of technological change. But these
are the costs of protecting the employment rights of workers. In
Soviet society the term efficiency has a social component so that
before technology is applied, questions, such as for what purpose
is it intended and who will benefit from it, have to be asked, and
not in some indefinable long term, but in the here and now.
A direct and important consequence of maintaining full
employment is that it eliminates the most important source of
poverty in industrialized societies, namely unemployment. The
possibility of poverty occurring is further reduced by the fact that
almost 40 per cent of the living standards of everyone is met by a
social wage through which esssential components are either
provided free or are heavily subsidized.
Peoples' needs are met by a series of rights in addition to that
guaranteeing work. There is a right to housing so that, although
there may be over-crowding or inadequate accommodation, there
are no homeless. Indeed, the cost of accommodation for
everyone throughout the Soviet Union has been maintained at
approximately 6 per cent of annual income since the 1950s. There
are rights to education, health protection and social security in
sickness and old age, of which all provisions are free. Workers arc
entitled to rest and leisure after a working week of 41 hours so
that overtime working is illegal. The vast majority of workers are
trade union members and for them and their families the cost of
their annual holidays is subsidized by at least 60 per cent. There
has been a remarkable degree of stability in the Soviet Union
over the last 30 years in the prices of essential foodstuffs. There
are no charges for local telephone calls; the prices of internal city
transport have been maintained at their 1956 level; books and
educational aids are subsidized. It may be that there are still
pockets of poverty but it is becoming increasingly difficult to find
them.
The Position of Women
The position of women in any society is a reliable guide to the
character of its freedoms for no society can be truly free unless
women have equality with men. The Soviet Union has laid the
basis for equality by providing for it in its Constitution. This, of
course, is only a necessary condition so that even with it equality
in practice may be evasive. But it is a major step to make
184
discrimination against women illegal.
Article 35 of the Constitution accords equality of rights
between women and men. It states: "Exercise of these rights is
ensured by according women equal access with men to education
and vocational and professional training, equal opportunities in
employment, remuneration, and promotion, and in social and
political and cultural activity, and by special labour and health
protection measures for women; by providing conditions enabling
mothers to work; by legal protection, and material and moral
support for mothers and children, including paid leave and other
benefits for expectant mothers, and gradual reduction of working
time for mothers with small children."
Article 53 refers to the position of women in marriage.
"Marriage", it states, "is based on the free consent of the woman
and the man; the spouses are completely equal in their family
relations. The state helps the family by providing and developing
a broad system of childcarc institutions, by organizing and
improving communal services and public catering, by paying
grants on the birth of a child, by providing children's allowances
and benefits for large families, and other forms of family
allowances and assistance. 1 ' The family relationship has altered
and alternated since the Bolshevik Revolution. Through the
Revolution marriage and divorce became matters of mutual
consent; divorce could be initiated by either party; marriage
became a legally egalitarian institution thus removing important
restrictions on the freedom of women. Abortion was widely
practised as a form of birth control in the 1920s but it was banned
between 1936 and 1955 when population growth was regarded as
being essential for the economy. Divorce was made more
difficult. Those restrictions have now been eased. There are other
indicators of equality, as Albert Szymanski stated: "Marriage is
considered to be neither a means for the economic support of
women, nor for the provision of household services by women.
Men have no legal obligation to support their wives or ex-wives;
women have no legal obligation to provide their husbands with
any services. Forcible sex by husbands is legally defined as rape;
women have the right to retain their maiden name, to control an
equal share of the communal property and, of course, equal
personal and property rights.*' 2
The experience of the Soviet Union since 1917 is that further
equality is dependent upon socializing men and women about sex
roles and gender and that this is a slow and uncertain process.
185
Sexism is still practised within families. Women still combine paid
employment with unpaid domestic labour. Despite the provisions
in the Constitution for sex equality in occupational promotion it
remains difficult for women to penetrate the upper levels of
decision-making on the same scale as men. Nonetheless Soviet
sex equality is qualitatively better than in the West. Women make
up 51 per cent of the Soviet labour force. They comprise almost
the same proportion of members of the local Soviets of People's
Deputies and a third of the USSR Supreme Soviet. More women
than men, 59 per cent as against 41 per cent, have higher education
qualifications. Women are frequently directors of factories, mills,
offices and state farms and leaders of trade unions. They are least
visible in the higher reaches of the Communist Party, in the Polit-
buro and on the Party Central Committee, though those bodies
consistently pursue policies favourable to women.
Virtually all Soviet women workers are trade union members
compared with less than 40 per cent of the British female labour
force. Soviet women, in April 1986, comprised 67.7 per cent of
the elected members of local trade union committees, 64.6 per
cent of trade union bodies at Republic, Territorial and Regional
level. 43.5 per cent of the membership of central trade union
committees and 35.8 per cent of the AUCCTU, the supreme
trade union council. In the Soviet Union women workers are
spread throughout all occupations, except underground mining
where it is illegal for them to work. In Britain, on the other hand,
women are concentrated in what have come to be called 'women's
occupations'. Between sixty-six and seventy-six per cent of all
employees in education, welfare, health, clerical work, selling,
catering, cleaning, hairdressing and other personal services are
women. Yet in the 9 trade unions which largely organized those
occupations in 1985 and had, therefore, the highest density of
female membership, only 19 per cent of the central executive
committee members and about 9 per cent of the full-time officers
were women. These figures are a marked improvement on those
of even four years previously when less than 13 per cent of central
executive committee members and less than 6 per cent of full-
time officers were women.
The Ethnic Minorities
A similar emphasis against discrimination is adopted in the case
of ethnicity and colour. Article 36 of the Constitution states:
186
"Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have
equal rights. . . Any direct or indirect limitation of the rights of
citizens or establishment of direct or indirect privileges on
grounds of race or nationality, and any advocacy of racial or
national exclusiveness, hostility or contempt, are punishable by
law." The question of the rights of nationalities has been
important since the time of Revolution when Joseph Stalin
became the Commissar of Nationalities. His task was to bring
former colonies in the Czar's empire into a socialist unity with the
already ethnically diverse Russia. Azerbaidzhan in the Trans-
caucus, and the Middle Asian Republics of Kazakhstan, Turk-
menistan, Kirgizistan, Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan before the
Revolution were identical to bordering colonies in the Ottoman
and British empires. They were equally exploited, deprived and
subjugated. All the indices of underdevelopment were present.
They were as Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tibet and Northern
India have remained, namely economically underdeveloped with
the majority of their population living under conditions of abject
poverty.
The colonies of the Czarist empire developed in a manner
familiar from the experience of British colonies in Africa and
Asia. They had virtually no industrial development but served
metropolitan Russia with raw materials and minerals and acted as
minor but expanding markets for consumer products. For this
purpose they were kept in bondage and received the minimum of
education, social services and health care. Indeed, the vast
majority of the people were excluded from such provisions and
depended upon kinship, clan or tribal assistance. In most cases
there was onlv local industry consisting of small artisan works. In
1911, Turkestan, for example, had 143 artisan enterprises, of
which only 9 employed more than 25 workers. In 1913 there were
only 204 workers in Tadzhikistan. About one per cent of the
populations of Soviet Asia belonged to the industrial working
class. 3 This level of development was comparable to that in
Nigeria in the late 1950s.
After the Revolution each of the Republics in Soviet Asia
underwent dramatic changes. Between 1913 and 1978 industrial
output in Turkmenistan increased by 74 times and 11 times after
1940; in Tadzhikistan it increased by 138 times and 16 times after
1940; in Kirgizistan industrial output rose by 333 times and 34
times after 1940; in Uzbekistan it multiplied by 71 times and 15
times after 1940; in Kazarkhistan the increase was 232 times and
187
30 times after 1940 while in Azerbaidzhan it went up by 62 times
and 11 times after 1940. 4 Agricultural output also increased but
not by such spectacular proportions.
These results came about through Soviet Asia's participation in
the series of national 5 Year Plans which transferred resources
from the richer regions of European Russia until indigenous
resources could be developed. Now Soviet Asia is rich with oil
minerals, fruit and cotton. Baku, the capital of Azerbaidzhan, is
the centre of the oil extractive and refining industry as well as
being a major port. Its wealth is evident in its buildings, parks,
leisure and cultural facilities. Uzbekistan is the country's biggest
cotton producer. Its capital, Tashkent, is a major industrial and
educational centre with relevance beyond Uzbekistan. Four-fifths
of the area of Turkmenistan was occupied by the Kara-Kum
Desert but it is now an irrigated fruit and cotton producing
centre. The Republics of Soviet Russia can be identified by their
specialisms but otherwise, in economic terms, there is little to
distinguish them from other Soviet Republics. Each of the fifteen
Soviet Republics depends upon local primary products.
Kazakhistan, for example, has rich mineral deposits on which has
been built a thriving heavy industry with a greater output per
head of coal, iron ore, cement and sulphuric acid than the USSR
average.
The continuing policy of Soviet governments has been to
achieve national equality whilst encouraging cultural diversity.
This has meant raising educational standards through the medium
of indigenous languages. There was much scope for this. At the
turn of the century only 2.6 per cent of the indigenous population
of Central Asia could read or write, which was about a tenth of
the rate in central Russia. There was not one higher school in
Central Asia. David Lane wrote that "In 1900 only 0.5 per cent of
the Kirghiz and 2 per cent of the Kazakhs were literat. In 1911,
of the 20 million muslim population, only 32,000 were enrolled in
Muslim religious schools and 46,000 in Russian elementary
schools. In Burgat-Mongolia the number of schools rose from 48
in 1917 to 700 in 1932-33, an increase from 1,000 to 67,000 pupils.
It was claimed that 99.3 per cent of children of school age were
attending school in Bashkiria in 1932-33." The literacy rate in
Tatania which had been 19 per cent before 1917 was over 90 per
cent in 1932-33. 5 In 1917, only 2 per cent of the population of
Uzbekistan could read or write yet by 1982 Tashkent was the
largest publisher of books in the Soviet Union after Moscow.
In many countries language has become a medium through
which political liberation activities have been pursued. This is
because conquering nations impose their languages as both a
symbol of their own power and the subservience of the conquered.
It is used as a real instrument of power for controlling
communications and imposing the dominant culture. The history
of colonialism is replete with illustrations. The British, French,
Spanish, Portugese, Dutch and Germans have each in their time
forcibly imposed their languages on conquered nations, insisting
that commerce, legal affairs and government should be con-
ducted in them. The British even placed a legal obligation on
trade unions in African colonies which organized predominantly
illiterate workers to appoint officials who were literate in English.
There are many anecdotes about the way in which black African
servants in expatriate households became objects of fun and
derision because of their inability to cope with a foreign language
and an alien culture. The power which white South African mine
owners have exercised over black miners has been symbolised by
the humiliating way the miners have been compelled to speak
through Fanagalo, a patois comprised of Arabic, English and
Zulu and designed to communicate the commmands of white
managements, The right to speak their own tribal language would
be, for black miners, a clear sign of emancipation.
It is informative to compare the relationships between the
languages of the Soviet Union with the treatment of Welsh and
Gaelic in relation to English in Great Britain. The closest
comparison is between the languages of the former Islamic
colonies of Czarist Russia which arc now Soviet Republics and
Russian on the one hand and the British languages on the other
hand. The English tried to destroy the indigenous languages in
Wales and Scotland in the process of colonizing them. Neither
Welsh nor Gaelic was ever given official recognition. They were
suppressed through the educational system until the 1960s when it
was really too late to save them. Through education the idea
became prevalent that English was the natural language tor
academic studies and the professions and that the indigenous
languages represented the backwardness of the poor and socially
inferior. People with social pretensions, therefore, preferred the
language of the colonizers. This ideological bias against Welsh
and Gaelic has had an important derogatory influence but the
main source of obstruction has come from government action. By
forbidding their use in official transactions and preventing their
189
development in schools the British government has largely made
Welsh and Gaelic speakers into illiterates and has prevented the
development of the languages. The languages have, in conse-
quence, been spoken by a declining proportion of the population
the dramatic extent of which can be seen in the table below. A
speaker at the Sixth Annual Congress of Celtic Studies in 1979
asserted that the "decline has now reached a point where people
expect the language to disappear early in the 21st century unless
something is done not only to stem the tide but to reverse it pretty
effectively." 6 The political significance of reversing the decline
was explained by Mr Saunders Lewis, a prominent Welsh
nationalist in a BBC broadcast in 1962. He said "To restore the
language is nothing short of revolution ... It is by revolutionary
methods that success is possible. Perhaps the language would
bring self-government in its wake . . . The language is more
important than self-government." 7 Saunders 1 challenge was taken
up by members of the Welsh Nationalist Party who founded
Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society,
which spearheaded the movement for Welsh independence with
civil disobedience tactics.
The Soviet Union has never had an official, de jure language.
All the languages of the indigenous peoples have been treated as
equal in administrative, judicial and official proceedings. In the
Constitution, Article 45 gives people the right "to attend a school
TABLE V
CHANGES IN THE NUMBER OF WELSH SPEAKERS
IN WALES, 1891-1971 8
WELSH SPEAKERS
NUMBER OF
AS A PROPORTION OF
TOTAL
WELSH
TOTAL POPULATION
YEAR
POPULATION
SPEAKERS
IN WALES
(1)
(2)
(3)
1891
1,629,630
880,000
54.00
1901
1,859,000
929,500
50.00
1911
2,273,023
977,400
43.00
1921
2.492,162
922,100
37.00
1931
233L026
909,100
37.00
1951
2,472,962
714,686
28.90
1961
2,523.085
656,002
26.00
1971
2,602,697
542,402
20.84
190
TABLE VI
CHANGES IN THE NUMBER OF GAELIC SPEAKERS
IN SCOTLAND, 1891- 1971 9
TOTAL
NUMBER
GAELIC SPEAKERS
POPULATION AGED
OF GAELIC
Ab A rKUrUK 1 lurN
vfar 1 YFARS AND OVER
OF nil
(1)
(2)
(3)
1891
3.721,778
254,415
6.84
1901
4.146,733
230,806
5.57
1911
4,439,802
202,398
4.56
1921
4,573,471
158,779
3.47
1931
4,588,909
136,135
2.97
1951
4,826,814
95,447
1.98
1961
4,892,822
80,978
1.66
1971
5,228,965
88,892
1.67
where
teaching is in the native language"
and this has been
practised with over 50 languages. This emphasis on indigenous
language, however, has not prevented Russian from becoming
the dominant one. It was the language of the colonizers in Czanst
Russia and possessed the status of the dominant power. It is the
language of the largest ethnic group in post-Revolutionary
Russia. It is the lingua franca for all the diverse language groups
and, since, 1938 has been a compulsory school subject. Most of
higher education is conducted in Russian. Without question
Russian is encroaching on the native languages yet as recently as
1970 Russian was spoken by only 14.5 per cent of the Uzbeks,
16.6 per cent of the Azerbaidzhanis and 15 per cent of the
Tadzhiks. In the following ten years these percentages rose
appreciably but it was still the case that from a quarter to two-
thirds of the national Muslim groups had little or no understand-
ing of Russian. After 70 years of communist government the vast
majority of the Islamic peoples in the Soviet Union still claim
their own national languages as their mother tongues.
The following table which shows the preference of the Islamic
peoples for their own languages also provides evidence in some
cases of an increasing reliance on indigenous languages since the
Revolution. When the 1926 Census was taken only about 20 out
of 150 national languages had a developed literary form. For the
rest, alphabets, standardised forms of grammar and vocabularies
were provided. Books and newspapers were printed in each of
191
TABLE VII
LANGUAGES OF SOVIET ISLAMIC PEOPLES 10
Percentage claiming Percentage speaking
Ethnic Group
own language as
mother tongue
Russian as second
language
1926
1970
1970
1979
Uzbeks
99 1
98.5
14.5
49.3
Kazakhs
99.6
97.5
41.8
52.3
Tatars
98.9
85.9
62.5
68.9
Azerbaidzhanis
93.8
97.9
16.6
29.5
Tadzhiks
98 3
97 8
15.5
29.6
Turkmen
97 3
98 7
15.4
25.4
Kirghiz
99 0
97 9
19 1
29.4
Chuvash
98 7
81 7
58 4
64.8
Bashkirs
67 0
53.3
64.9
Chechens
99 7
98 6
66 7
76.0
Kabevrdians
99 3
97.9
71 .4
76.7
Karakalpuks
87 5
95.9
10.4
45.1
Uighurs
52.7
86.1
35.6
52,1
Ingush
99.5
97.4
71.2
79.6
Karachais
99.5
97.7
67.6
75.5
Kurds
34.4
83.6
19.6
25.4
Balkars
99.6
96.9
71.5
77.4
Dungans
99.2
94.8
48.0
62.8
Cherkess
98.4
91.4
70.0
69.6
Persians
67.8
30.7
33.9
57.1
Abazins
94.4
95.3
69.5
75.4
Baluchis
99.9
98.1
2.9
4.9
the languages so that people could become literate in them.
Indeed if the national languages had not been developed it is
unlikely that there would have been such a rapid improvement in
literacy after the Revolution. The experience then of the various
Soviet linguistic groups has been the contrary of the Welsh and
the Scots. There has been no sign of colonialism in the
relationship between Russian and the other Soviet languages.
Clearly, when languages and cultures are separated from economic
exploitation they can grow and flourish freely without the
negative features of political nationalism.
192
The equalising processes in Soviet society can be seen through
the provision of education and medical services. The Soviet Asian
Republics have educational facilities which compare favourably
with the rest of the country. For example, whereas the number of
students for everv 10,000 populations was 187 for the Soviet
Union as a whole in 1968-69, it ranged from 131 in Turkmenistan
to 192 Uzbekistan. These figures were lower than that for the
USA which was 226, but they were much higher than in Britain
where onlv 63 out of every 10,000 were students and in Iran
Pakistan and Turkey where the figures were 14, 26 and 30
respectively. 11
The Soviet health care provisions are made through a system ot
hospitals, polyclinics, overnight disease prevention centres, sani-
torias. rest centres and holiday homes. Shortly after the Revolu-
tion Lenin issued a decree taking over all the salubrious resorts,
which hitherto had been used by the rich and royalty, for use by
the workers and peasants. Now these resorts, mainly in the
Caucasian mountains and on the Black Sea coast are centres for
treatment, rest and holidays. Each layer of the pyramid of
services is staffed by qualified medical personnel, including
doctors. , , . e ,
The availability of doctors for the general population is a usetul
indicator of the spread of health care. In the middle 1960s there
were 259 doctors for each 100,000 population in the Soviet Union
as a whole, the ratio was lower in Azerbaidzhan where it was 243
and in Soviet Asia where it ranged from 154 in Tadzhiktstan to
201 in Kazakhstan but these differences were minimal m
comparison with the ratios in Third World countries. In Pakistan
for example, there were only 16 doctors for every 100,000
population; in India the comparable figure was 22 and in Iran, 35.
Tadzhikistan, the Republic least provided with doctors, nonethe-
less had more for everv 100,000 population than Britain where
the figure was 152. 12 During the decade of the 1970s coinciding
with the period of detente there was a large increase m the
number of Soviet doctors so that in 1980 there were 375 for every
100,000 population compared with 159 in Japan, 164 in Britain,
153 in France, 198 in Ttaly and 225 in the USA.
The Soviet Asian Republics have differed from other Republics
in some respects. They have had a faster population growth m the
post-war period than the predominantly Slav areas. Between
1970 and 1979 the population growth rate for the Slav peoples in
the Soviet Union was 5.8 per cent compared with 23.6 per cent
193
for the Islamic people. The rate of growth for the Uzbeks and the
Tadzhiks was more than 35 per cent. This has had the effect of
showing a slower rate of per capita income growth for Soviet Asia
than for other areas. In reality, however, wage rates there have
been as much as 20 per cent above the average as a way of
attracting labour and stimulating productivity. 13
Whatever differences do exist between the Soviet Republics,
however, they are less than those which exist between areas in
Britain. There are no differences in employment levels in the
USSR but in Britain in 1986 the percentage rates of unemployment
ranged from 7.3 per cent in the Home Counties to 20 per cent in
parts of the North East and nearly 19 per cent in the Clyde district
of Scotland with concomitant variations in living standards.
Indeed the visible differences between regions in Britain are
much more obvious than anything found in the Soviet Union.
A similar picture is provided when comparisons are made with
the USA. There are wide variations in the overall living standards
of different ethnic groups in the USA. The following table shows
how badly Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics fare in
relation to white Americans in all the indices.
There are also marked regional variations in the USA. Take,
for example, the position of Appalachia in the USA. Appalachia
consists of the coal producing regions of Kentucky, West
Virginia, Tennessee and Virginia and it has a continuous history
TABLE VIII
SOCIAL INDICATORS FOR SELECTED MINORITIES
IN THE USA IN 1970
MEAN
PAMILY
POOR
COLLEGE
PERCENTAGE
MINORITY
INCOMR
%
EDUCATED UNEMPLOYED
White American
$11,348
8.6
11.3
4.9
Black American
$ 7.074
29.9
4.4
6.9
Native American
$ 6,857
33.3
3.8
ri.i
Oriental American
$12,240
8.8
26.4
3.2
Mexican American
$ 8.192
21.2
4.5
6.4
Source: American Public Health Association.
Minority Health Chart Book, 1.974.
194
of poverty and deprivation in relation to the rest of *e USA
Many American social analysts have commented on his fact.
Cynthia Duncan from Berea in Kentucky stated that "Chrome
poverty has plagued rural Kentucky since the turn of the century
esneciallv counties in which residents depend upon small farms or
coal mining "for their livelihoods". 14 John Gaventa writing from
T^ee'said "the images most ^.^^J* ^£
Appalachia are those of poverty . . . Although by ^74 per capita
mcLe in Central Appalachia had nser , to 65 per <™t aftte
nation's average (up from 52 per cent in 1965) m 1970, 35 per cent
of fami lies hved below the poverty level, 72 per cent of the adul
popXtiot had less than a high school education , £ .problems ot
unemployment and poor health care persisted. The ssue tor
AppalacWa is not simply that it portrays pmtstet, * PW**£
a generally rich countrv but that Appalachia itself possesses
tremendous wealth ,n the form of natural resources. It is the most
mTortant coal producing region in the USA and ranks high as a
mine al producer. "Central Appalachia", Gaventa commented
^a region of poverty amidst riches." No matter what the
Edition of the American economy, none of the wealth goes to
?he Appalachian people. This was so even during the coal oom
period I in the 1970s. The paradox is not explained by ethn c
Sination for the inhabitants of Appalachia are P^m^
white Americans. Different explanations have been given tor it,
as tta personality defects of the Appalachian mountain to k
and neglect by the Federal government but the one which ha
received greatest currency is that it is a case of colonial
TxpSon Helen Lewis one of Appalachians most incisive
Sotifts ™w the paradox as a "process through which
Snan outS industrial interests establish control, exploU he
region and maintain their domination and subjugation of the
egion' - She added that "Appalachia is a good example of
colonial domination by outside interests . . Th , Sow Union
contains no region which could even remotely be described by
such an explanation because it does not contain the contraction
which produce exploitative relations. There is .no dommant
Soviet Republic which exploits the resource o ^
nor is there a dominant class which resides in one Republic aia
exploits the resources of others. There is no exploitative
elafcnship between the Russian Soviet Federal Social, Republ.
which contains Moscow and Leningrad and Uzbetastan,
Azerbaidzhan or any other Repubhcs in the Soviet Union.
195
The Absence of Imperialism
Human rights involve the relationships between countries as
well as between individuals within a country. One country can
deny human rights to the inhabitants of another. This is what the
United Nations meant by including fascism, colonialism and
genocide in its Declaration in 1948. It is under this heading that
the Soviet Union has been accused in the West of infringing
human rights in East European Socialist countries and Third
World countries with whom it has relationships. The Socialist
countries are generally described as Soviet satellities but specific
allegations have been made about the presence of Soviet troops
in Hungary in 1956. Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in
1979. It is also asserted that the Soviet Union is imperialist in its
relations with Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Mozambique and
Angola, to whom it provides aid.
There is a close parallel between the external policies of a
country and how it treats its own parts, namelv classes, sexes,
ethnic minorities and regions. Indeed they all belong to the same
processes. If a country is exploitative and discriminating in the
conduct of its domestic affairs it will be imperialist in its external
relations. Similarly if a nation behaves towards others in an
imperialist way this is information about its structural character.
On the other hand, a country which does not contain the
contradictions which give rise to exploitation cannot be imperialist
in the strict meaning of the term in its external relations.
Imperialism is a condition of society and not simply an
explanation of inter-country relations. The classic case of
imperialism is where one country seeks to solve its economic
problems by exploiting others through acquiring control of their
raw materials, utilizing their supplies of labour and gaining
exclusive access to their markets. Colonialism is a particular form
of imperialism whereby these palliatives are reached through the
acquisition of land for permanent settlement on it. Africa, for
example, provides an illustration of extensive imperialism with
pockets of colonialism in Algeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South
Africa.
The conclusion that Appalachia has been treated as a colony is
a statement about the predatory condition of American society. It
is saying that Appalachia has been exploited for its coal and
minerals and its supplies of labour. And as it has no other
redeeming features for American capitalism, when these have
196
been exhausted or displaced there will be no further use for it.
The exploitation of the Durham coalfield in Britain and the
dereliction caused in Wales and Scotland have been similar
experiences to that of Appalachia. The point is that in the
struggle for private profit through the free market domestic
sources of materials, labour and markets are invariably tapped
first. When these are inadequate the search extends abroad.
External exploitation is, therefore, an extension of internal
exploitative processes. When the giant oil multinational com-
panies which own and exploit Appalachian coal reserves found
them inadequate they sought coal in Third World countries and
began to withdraw from Appalachia. Occidental Petroleum
opened mammoth opencast mines in China while Exxon invested
in coal production in Columbia in South America. British textile
companies, unable to make profits from production in Lancashire
and Yorkshire, transferred their production to South-East Asia.
In other words, the substance of imperialism is the constant,
unremitting struggle through competitive markets for lower costs
and higher profits. In appearances, Appalachia, South Wales,
South Africa, Taiwan and Scotland may appear to be different
but analytically they are the same.
The point to recognize is not simply that there is a similarity
between domestic and foreign relationships but that one is
derived from and interacts with the other. If a society is not
imperialist within itself then it cannot be imperialist with others.
Thus, looking at how a society conducts its own affairs is the key
to understanding its international relations. There are no class
antagonisms in the Soviet Union; whilst sex equality has not been
achieved it has a substantial economic foundation; there are
distinct linguistic and cultural differences between the many
ethnic groups but these are not reflected in national independ-
ence movements of the kind which exists in Wales or Scotland.
Some ethnic groups, particularly in the Republics of the Ukraine,
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, have a highly developed sense of
nationality with fringe elements which would prefer political
separation from the Soviet Union. Much of the discussion about
the nationalism of those groups, however, stems from the
imagination of exiles who are anti-communist, rather than from
Soviet reality. There are no nationalist movements, with either
indigenous or exiled bases, for the liberation of the former
Czarist Asian colonies.
The Second World War was a testing ground for the unity of
197
the Soviet Union. If any of the large ethnic groups such as the
Ukrainians had wanted political independence then the con-
ditions of the war would have provided them with opportunities
to achieve it. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in
1941 a few small ethnic groups were sufficiently disaffected, or
misguided, to seek collaboration with them in the hope of thereby
gaining independence. This was to be expected. The Revolution
was only 24 years old; it had been extended to the countryside
barely 11 years before. The Baltic Republics of Lithuania, Latvia
and Estonia had been associated with the Soviet Union for a mere
year when the Germans invaded and they contained significant
groups of middle-class traders, rich peasants and government
functionaries who had no sympathy for communism. In the Baltic
Republics and those parts of the Ukraine and Byelorussia which
had been part of Poland until September 1939 when the Red
Army occupied Eastern Poland, there were nationalist organiza-
tions which collaborated with the German invaders. The Lithuanian
Partisans, the Latvian Perkonkursts (Thunder-Cross) and the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) were pro-
German, anti-Semitic and anti-Soviet. The OUN had paramilitary
units, namely, the Ukrainska Powstanska Armia (UPA), led by
Andrei Melnik and Stephen Bandera, which became active only
after the withdrawal of the Soviet forces. It murdered large
sections of the Jewish population before the arrival of the
German army. 17
The nationalist groups looked to the Germans for political
independence but this was refused. They then found themselves
fighting both the Germans and the partisan units attached to the
Red Army. In the Ukraine they split into three groups and fought
each other until 1943 when the Bandera faction came out on top.
They sought influence whenever they could get it in the Nazi
occupied territories and achieved some prominence and criminal
notoriety as kapos in concentration camps, particularly in the
notorious Treblinka camp in Poland.
In so far as the nationalist groups had any influence, however,
it was a dwindling asset. They suffered increasingly from
defections and were opposed by a large, growing and militarily
significant Ukrainian Partisan Movement under the leadership of
General Strokach. The Ukrainian partisans did not consist of
unco-ordinated gangs in the forests, though doubtless many such
groups existed. They operated under the auspices of the Red
Army and in the winter of 1943 passed under its direct control. In
198
August, 1943, Strokach co-ordinated the activities of 20 partisan
groups totalling about 17,000 members in West Ukraine alone,
cutting the German lines of communication and preventing the
movement of reserves to Kiev. 18 The Ukrainian partisans came
under the direct control of the Communist Party committees in
the partisan areas from 13 January 1944. 19 The same happened
elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The initiative for preparing for the
defeat of the Germans passed to the local people. So it was the
Ukrainians who organized for the advance of the Red Army,
containing many Ukrainian units, to recapture their own territory
by the Spring of 1944.
There were a few cases of collaboration with the invading
German army amongst the Moslem communities in the Crimea
and Northern Caucasia. The Crimea was occupied by the
Germans from 1941-1944 and shortly after it was liberated in May
1944 almost 200,000 Crimea Tatars were exiled to Central Asia
and Kazakhstan as punishment for collaboration. They were
officially rehabilitated in 1967 and allowed to return to their
previous homes. The Chechen and Ingush peoples were similarly
deported from their homeland in the Northern Caucasus to
Central Asia around the same time but rehabilitated in 1957 in
the wake of the Twentieth Party Congress. When the German
Army entered the Karachaj Autonomous Province in August
1942 "and the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Republic in October
1942 some of the Karachais and the Balkans collaborated. Their
communities were punished in 1944 through deportation which
was also rescinded in 1957. 20 It was characteristic of the Soviet
war effort that no property was spared and no human effort
withheld to defeat the German Army. The other side of this coin
was an intolerance of those who failed to provide that degree of
commitment. Temporary deportation was a minor price to pay
compared with the phenomenal costs of opposition to the
German army borne by the vast majority of Soviet people .
The classical Western explanation of the commitment of the
former Czarist Asian colonies to the USSR is that it results from
centralized state coercion, organized and managed from Moscow.
This follows from the Western assumption that the Soviet Union
is a totalitarian state in which there can be no voluntaristic
political behaviour. There are, however, two difficulties with this
explanation. First, even if the Western assumption is valid, it has
to be explained why those Republics possess no national
liberation movements for though struggles for political indepen-
199
dence have been subdued they have rarely been eradicated
There should at least be language societies taking up the cause of
liberation, as in Wales, or, at the most, aimed struggles, as in
Northern Ireland or the Basque region of Spain. If they have
been coerced into national unity and they possess no visible signs
of disaffection then they are clearly historical oddities. Secondly,
the explanation has to clarify not simply why the Asian Republics
are a part of the USSR but why they are beneficiaries from being
Soviet Republics for they provide the most complete examples
this century of the transformation of societies from under-
developed colonial Third World states to developed status
without the destruction of their indigenous languages and
cultures. It is clear that in neither instance can coercion figure
in the answer.
There are clearly no internal contradictions in Soviet society
which could generate imperialist external relations. There are no
obvious economic reasons why it should want to exercise control
over other territories. It has an abundance of raw materials and a
vastly under-exploited domestic market. The Soviet Union's
main task is to develop its own potential and it can do this without
exploiting others. But if this is the case what determines its
relations with other countries.
There are two sets of explanations. The Soviet Union still has a
fear of counter-revolution and a deep sensitivity about protecting
its borders. It will require many generations of world peace to
erase the memory of the German invasion of 1941. It requires a
long-term stability on its borders to lessen its fears. This is one
reason why the Soviet Union places such emphasis on maintaining
the Yalta Agreement of 1945 which drew lines of demarcation
between capitalist and communist spheres of interest. And it
accounts for its reaction to what it perceived as counter-
revolutionary pressures in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afgha-
nistan. No country can ignore its own history, particularly one in
which it has been ravaged twice in living memory.
A different set of non-exploitative factors accounts for the
Soviet Union's relations with Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua,
Mozambique, Angola and liberation movements in general.
Communism is an ideology which expresses the aspirations of
ordinary working people, whether they arc wage earners or
peasants. The Soviet Union symbolizes that ideology and,
therefore, has an identity with working class struggles whenever
they take place. Where it is possible for the Soviet Union to give
200
assistance it does so. It has been materially involved in all the
major revolutionary movements since 1945, from China to
Nicaragua.
This involvement is construed in the West as an international
communist conspiracy to subvert and grasp power in Western
democracies and their allies which is initiated and directed from
Moscow. Communist activity everywhere is perceived in the same
terms. The American government reacts to the presence of
indigenous communists by describing them as puppets of Moscow;
the British government accuses British communists of spreading
an "alien ideology", meaning a Russian one, and advises them
"to go back to Moscow". Western capitalism views communism
as Soviet imperialism. Every act of aid, therefore, whether it
takes the form of medical supplies or guns, is regarded as a
subversive act in the interest of the Soviet Union. The American
government is especially sensitive, therefore, when Soviet aid
reaches countries, like Nicaragua, which are in the American
sphere of influence. This sensitivity is not like that of the Soviet
Union, about protecting its borders. The USA has never
experienced war on its own soil since the Civil War nor has it ever
been threatened with invasion. There is no possibility of tiny
Nicaragua or any other nearby recalcitrant republic threatening
the USA in any way. American sensitivity arises from the
Western capitalist belief that revolutions can be exported and the
main vehicle for doing this is ideology. Social theory in the West,
including sociology and economics, teaches that all societies
contain intrinsic consensus qualities and that change, in conse-
quence, comes about through external pressures. This is the
theoretical basis for the belief in the international communist
conspiracy. The Communist Party in the Soviet Union, directed
by the Politburo in Moscow, is perceived, therefore, as a
conspirator par excellence, converting vulnerable Third World
countries to communism.
The reality of the relationship between the Soviet Union and
Third World countries is different from this. There has been no
example of any country in history experiencing a revolutionary
transformation for any reason except contradictions in its own
social forces. Revolutions arise only out of material conditions.
They cannot be packaged and posted from Moscow, or anywhere
else. They are essentially domestic affairs, as the Nicaraguan
Sandinistas will testify. Ideas help to clarify issues, to identify the
most important causal variables and, therefore, to formulate
201
action which relates to the needs of the situation. In no sense can
the ideas have any effect except through the material conditions
and for this they have to be strictly relevant. In so far, then, as
Soviet propaganda has any impact it is because it is addressed to
conditions which already have a revolutionary potential. ]f the
propaganda is hand-made from specifically Soviet conditions then
it can have little effect even if a revolutionary potential exists.
The gist of this point is that capitalism creates its own revolutions
and generates its own ideas about them. Marxism has to have
rather special homespun qualities to be of any use.
There is then no possibility of the Soviet Union creating a
communist revolution overseas though it can help to sustain one
already undertaken. Its main contribution to liberation move-
ments in Third World countries is encouragement firstly by
symbolising a successful workers' revolution and secondly by
providing comradeship backed by material succour and support.
It is of great significance, for instance, for the Nicaraguan
peasants to recognize that their struggle is part of a wider struggle
for emancipation and that they have friends and allies in various
parts of the world. It is also important that they receive material
assistance. Whether or not this type of Soviet involvement
extends or retards human rights depends on who answers the
question , No doubt the Sandinista soldier recuperating in a Soviet
rest home and the Nicaraguan peasants defending the Revolution
which freed them from the tyranny of an American sponsored
dictatorship will think that the Soviet Union has a positive
interest in their human rights.
FOOTNOTES
1 . Soviet Economic Development Since W7bv Maurice Dobb, 1948, pp. 189-
191.
2. Szymanski, op. cit., p. 103-4. See also Gail W Lapidus. Women in Soviet
Society, California, 1978.
3. Socialism and Capitalism; Score and Prospects, Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1971.
4. Szymanski, op. cit., p. 39.
5. Politics and Society in the USSR, by David Lane, 1970 and 1978. p. 441 .
6. Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Celtic Studies, University
College, Galway, 3-13 July, 1979. Dublin. 1983, p. 85.
7. ibid, p. 91.
8. Source: Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Celtic Studies,
1986, p. 85 and p. 100.
9. ibid, p. 100.
202
]0 Abstracted from Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union by Shirin Akiner,
1983. Tables 2.3 and 2.4, pp. 26-29.
| 1 . Socialism and Capitalism: Score and Prospects, op cit , p . 62 .
12. ibid, p. 64.
13. Lane, op cit, p. 398.
14. Kentucky Economy. Review and Perspective, Summer, 1984, Vol. 8, No. 2.
p. 8.
15. Power and Powerless ness. Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian
Valley, Oxford, 1980, p. 34.
16. Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case, by Helen
Matthews Lewis, Linda Johnson and Donald Askins, North Carolina,
1978 < P- 2
17. Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution by Isaiah Trunk, New York, 1979.
pp. 38-39. Also The Road to Berlin by John Erickson. 1983. pp. 182-183.
18. Erickson, ibid, p. 124.
19. ibid, p. 147.
20. Akiner, op. cit., p. 87. p. 175, p. 198, p. 203 and p. 227.
203
PART III
Power in the USA
Chapter Eight
The Potsdam Conference:
A Spoiled Opportunity
History is a process in which great men and women play only
minor parts, affecting timing and pace but rarely d.rection
S casionally, however" they may figure as a vita par. in cornet-
ine the iigsaw. making for success or fa.iure. In other words, they
do™: by themselvesW any causal sign " m d« «g
historical events but without them, events would be d ifferent. It is
clear for example, that Lenin did not create the Bolshevik Revo-
mt^ but that'wtthout his .eadership i« might not
place when it did or in the same precise form The
occurred throuah an historically unique set of circumstance of
wh'ch the qualify of his leadership was one essential element, It is
far this reaTon, and not as the architects of victory or the creators
of defeat, that personalities are interesting.
The part which personalities have played in the Motyoh*
Sotictism should be analyzed in the same manner . PohtttJ
leaders moved in and out of the events following the Bolshevik
Revolution but until the Second World War started with the
31. of the Soviet Union nothing ha^aed to tfc > history
jigsaw to make them significant. Then from W «w«
dramatic changes in the conditions which had g.ven nse to ant,
S °The two sides, capitalist and socialist, were posited in a situa-
tion in which sheer survival became more important than deolo-
l ical diragreements. As enforced allies, the USA and Bntain on
?he one side and the Soviet Union on the other, recognized the
value of mutual support and co-operation. It may have been that
his recognition was simply a legitimation and rational non of
he conditions enforced on them. This seemed to be the case with
wtns on Churchill, the British Prime Minister He gave to a
support to the war effort along with the Sov.et Union but it was
ZZ a matter of expediency. Churchill's mind was never free o
scheme which, whilst prosecuting the war, restramcd Soviet
207
expansion at the same time. His war strategy was strongly
influenced by this factor.
This did not seem to be the case with the US President, Franklin
D. Roosevelt, who showed all the signs of conversion in his
attitude to the Soviet Union. His wartime experience convinced
him that not only should the USA and the Soviet Union collaborate
in the post-war period but that they could in fact do so. He
reasoned that if it was possible to collaborate in war then why not
in peacetime? One consequence of Roosevelt's conversion was
that he found himself in disagreement with Churchill more
frequently than with Stalin.
Tt seems clear, therefore, that in the combination of circum-
stances which forged the wartime alliance the personality of
Roosevelt played a significant part. He was not compelled by the
force of circumstances in the same way as Churchill. There were
not the same powerful dramatic pressures to support the Soviet
Union in the USA as in Britain. Indeed in the USA anti-Soviet
forces, such as the American Federation of Labor, maintained
their stances despite the waT. Roosevelt could have been much
more circumspect about the Soviet Union than he was without
any loss to his prestige. Churchill, on the other hand, would have
faced mounting criticism if he had hedged his public support for
the Soviet war effort. He was, in any event, criticized for not
opening a Second Front sooner than 1944.
The issues raised in this chapter concern the immediate post-
war period. President Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945, more
than three years before the end of his term of office and a mere 27
days before the final capitulation of the German army. It is a
legitimate question to ask whether the war settlement would have
been different if Roosevelt had not died. He was succeeded by
Harry S. Truman whose attitude towards the Soviet Union
remained unalterably hostile during the war. Truman was present
at Potsdam in July 1945 when the three heads of state held
their only meeting in peacetime, when the news was received of
the successful testing of the atom bomb and when the attitudes
which coalesced into the 'Cold War' became apparent. There
were other changes in the Conference personnel. Winston
Churchill's place was taken over by Clement Attlce, the new
Labour Prime Minister, but this had no dramatic implications, for
the outcome of the Conference, except that Attlee was more
compliant in his dealings with the Americans than Churchill
would have been.
208
The Potsdam Conference was a unique historical opportunity.
Held in the wake of the victories of the Red Army, it was the first
occasion in the history of the Soviet Union in peacetime when it
was treated as an equal partner in negotiations with Britain and
the USA. Before then the Western capitalist states had always
acted from a position of economic and military superiority and
with a high degree of contempt and hostility towards the Soviet
Union. It was an occasion on which the collaboration of the war
years could have been continued but instead it was marked by the
transformation of the pre-war Western attitude of 'confident
hostility' towards the Soviet Union to one of 'fearful hostility',
leading to the 'Cold War'. Lastly it could have been the occasion
at which nuclear secrets were shared but instead it was the begin-
ning of the nuclear posturing of the US government.
The previous summit meeting had been at Yalta in the Soviet
Union in February, 1945. That conference had been held at a
critical phase of the war. A German counter-offensive had been
mounted in the middle of December, 1944 and Churchill had
appealed for Soviet help to relieve the pressure on the Western
Front. A month later the Soviet forces attacked along the Eastern
Front for the sole purpose of helping the Western allies. The
need for military interdependence was glaringly obvious. The
Western allies had no choice but to recognize the Soviet Union as
a major power.
The victories of the Red Army, leaving the Germans deteated
and demoralized, created a euphoria in Britain about the Soviet
Union which pervaded the relations between the countries.
Chester Wilmot, a critical observer of the Soviet Union, wrote
that "in the Anglo-Saxon countries there was a tremendous
upsurge of sympathy and goodwill towards the Soviet Union in
recognition of the Red Army's heroic resistance." 3 But there was
more to it than an admiration of military prowess. The Red Army
had drawn attention to the phenomenal powers of survival and
resilience shown by Soviet society in general. Virtually the whole
of European Russia had been over-run by the Germans and sub-
jected to a 'scorched earth' policy. Between 1941 and 1945, 1710
cities and over 70,000 villages were razed to the ground. Premier
cities such as Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk and Stalingrad were almost
totally destroyed, 40,390 miles of railway track were lost as was
60 per cent of the Soviet steel and coal industries. Yet neither the
social fabric of Soviet life, nor its economic organization was
destroyed. Soviet society recovered and provided the means for
209
victory. The flickering admiration which British workers had
expressed for a land without capitalists before the war turned to
glow which had political repercussions. There is no doubt that the
Labour Party's unexpected momentous electoral victory in J u i v
1945, on the eve of the Potsdam Conference, was due in part to
the popularity of Soviet socialism. The Labour Party owed a debt
to the Soviet people which it never repayed or even acknowledged.
The environmental context of Potsdam had other qualities.
The European war had ended and with it went the military need
for unity. Like countries following successful national liberation
struggles, old divisions and some new ones surfaced to make life
difficult. There was still some need for collaboration in the Far
East but that was rapidly lessening. Roosevelt had asked Stalin
for assistance in the war against Japan once the European war
was over and this had been agreed at the Tehran Conference in
November, 1943, By the time of Potsdam the Americans were
apprehensive lest that assistance led to Soviet territorial claims in
the Far East. Churchill, observing American reactions, noted to
his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, l It is clear that the United
States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in
the war against Japan." 4 But whilst military prerequisites for
international collaboration had gone, economic and political ones
had taken their place. The political face of Europe had been
transformed by the war. The Red Army was in occupation of a
substantial part of East and Central Europe, including Prussia
and Berlin, and exercised influence there by protecting the social
forces for change and facilitating the rise to power of working
class organizations. The Western powers had to put large
question marks against the political futures of Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and, maybe,
Germany itself, which disturbed them. The pre-war fascist
regimes which had acted as bulwarks against the spread of
communism no longer existed and the West could not assume that
similarly compliant governments would emerge.
Virtually independently of this context, however, the British
and American delegations went to the Potsdam Conference with
different approaches which were partly determined by their own
traditional perceptions of wartime unity with the Soviet Union.
There was also an important new face at the Conference table.
Harry S Truman was a bitter, calculating anti-Communist who,
immediately after the Soviet Union was invaded suggested that
the United States help whichever side seemed to be losing. He
210
said that "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help
Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and
that way let them kill as many as possible." 5 One of Truman s first
major acts of foreign policy after succeeding Rooseve It as
President was to end Lend-Lease deliveries to the Soviet Union
on H May 194S without consultation and in such an abrupt
fashion that ships on the high seas were recalled with their
cargoes. Truman, however, was unsure of himself amidst the
fir eat leaders at Potsdam and, in any event, he was still served by
aides chosen by Roosevelt. In fact most of the civilian members ot
the American delegation to Potsdam were career officials in the
State Department and Foreign Service who had served Roosevelt.
The difference between the American and British attitudes was
accurately expressed by Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador m
Washington, when he wrote in a note to W'mston Churchill: 1
judge that American tactics with the Russians will be to display at
the outset confidence in Russian willingness to co-operate. 1
should also expect the Americans in dealing with us to be more
responsive to arguments based upon the danger of economic chaos
in European countries than to the balder pleas about the risks of
extreme left Governments or of the spread of Communism
At the back of their minds there arc still lingering suspicions that
we want to back Right Wing Governments or monarchies for
their own sake." 6 The Americans, in their own brietmg notes ior
Potsdam, confirmed this impression. And even though the British
deleeation changed during the Conference they had no need to
alter their view. Churchill had called a snap election for 5 July
1945 and he had to leave the Conference for the poll result on 2o
Julv Churchill, whose party was resoundly defeated, did not
return. Instead the British delegation comprised the new Prime
Minister, Clement Attlee, and the new Foreign Secretary, Ernest
Bevin. It is to the lasting shame of that Labour government that
its representatives did not reflect the warmth and admiration for
the Soviet Union which was being expressed by the majority of
the British electorate. The British delegates produced the con-
ventional social democratic hostility to communism which in
some wavs was more damaging to the Conference proceedings
than that of Mr Churchill. Fortunately, Attlee and Bevm, like
Truman, were inexperienced and hesitant in world politics.
The Potsdam Conference was one brief but critical moment in
the historv of contemporary capitalism when the stage of the
world was occupied by the Soviet Union with the consent ot the
211
USA and grudging acquiescence by Britain, It was acknowledeeri
in its new status long enough for its imprint to be made on th
post-war world. That imprint has been consolidated and enlarged
over the last 40 years. If the perception of international power it
Potsdam had been different, as it was for example, when Winston
Churchill made his speech at Fulton, Missouri, USA on 5 March
1946 in which he stated that "an iron curtain has descended across
the continent. Behind that line lies all the capitals of the ancient
states of central and eastern Europe . . . subject in one form or
another ... to a very high increasing measure of control from
Moscow . then the peace of the world would have been in
jeopardy for the third time this century. The post-war settlement
expressed through the Potsdam Agreement was based on a balance
of power which was not distorted by the intense anti-Soviet
propaganda which both preceded and followed it. Any other
settlement would have contained instabilities and contradictions
which would have disrupted world relationships within a decade
for it would not have been based on the reality of post-war power.
The Watershed
The Potsdam Conference was a watershed in the history of
hostility shown by the Western capitalist powers towards the
Soviet Union. There had been no real break in the Western
capitalist desire to destroy the Soviet Union. At first the
Bolshevik Revolution was regarded with contempt. Few Western
politicans expected the new Bolshevik Government to last longer
than six months. When it did their contempt was tinged with
annoyance and they intervened. When the war of intervention
failed they turned to economic and ideological pressures. But
throughout the inter-war years the Soviet Union never ranked high
for discussion on the agendas of the Western powers. They adopted
an attitude of "confident hostility". They feared communism but
did not regard the Soviet Union as a threat in itself. They had a
low regard for its militancy prowess as was evidenced by the
reporting by the Western press of the Soviet-Finnish War in 1 939
and the forecasts by British politicians that the Germans would
take from 3 to 6 weeks to conquer the Soviet Union.
The Western perception of Soviet military prowess changed
during the second world war. No Western politicians expected the
German advances to be reversed when Odessa, Stalingrad and
Kiev were occupied, when Leningrad was under siege and German
212
guns were in the Western suburbs of Moscow. None of them
expected Soviet industry, eighty per cent of which was on wheels
in the autumn of 1941, being transported to the East, to have the
resilience for recovery. None of them expected Soviet society to
recover from the self-inflicted "scorched earth" policy which they
pursued in the fight against the German army. Yet against
appalling odds the German army was turned back, Soviet
industry did recover and Soviet society was re-established. This
was a frightening spectacle for Western capitalists.
Once the war with Germany was over and the war with Japan
was in its terminal stage the Western powers were confronted by a
Soviet Union which bore no resemblance to that of the inter-war
years. The world balance of power had altered inexorably. The
Western powers became not simply fearful of communism but
also of the Soviet Union, They became apprehensive about every
move made by the Soviet Government, They adopted an attitude
of "fearful hostility".
As I have indicated above there were forces at Potsdam which
prevented the overt expression of fear and hostility and which
extended the comradely unity from war into peace. But already
tension was building up in the background over such issues as
Polish boundaries, the election of governments in Bulgaria,
Hungary and Rumania, the allocation of responsibilities in
occupied Germany and reparations. There had been a calculated
move to divide the Allied Powers even before the final defeat of
Germany when the German High Command attempted to
negotiate a peace treaty only on the Western Front, leaving it free
to fight the Soviet Union. Governments in exile which expressed
pre-war political aims and did not reflect post-war realities
attempted to regain their positions and in doing so put wedges
between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.
Differences over the meaning of democracy emerged in all the
discussions about the occupied territories. The Western powers
insisted that democracy meant the creation of a multi-party
parliamentary system in the mould of their own images and the
holding of free elections, while the Soviet Union insisted that
democracy could only be based on the assumption of power by
the majority, that is the working class. There was no compromise
solution to this problem for the Soviet perception involved the
removal of power from the minority bourgeoisie while the
Western one entailed the continuation of their power position.
This difference was the essence of the struggle between capitalism
213
and communism. It took on a new meaning for the West after
Potsdam for the influence of Soviet democracy had been ex-
tended over much of central and eastern Europe, was growing i n
China and emerging in South East Asia. The "cordon sanitaire"
around the Soviet Union had been broken. It was now the hege-
mony of capitalism which was under threat. The power of the
Soviet Union was not simply something remembered from battles
won but could be seen in its extending influence in the world.
This new power situation had important consequences for the
anti-communist strategies of Western capitalism. After the
Bolshevik revolution the USA engaged in its own ideological
cleansing campaign through the Red Scare. When that was over it
retreated into isolationism. The British Government conducted
its own internal campaign but primarily against the trade union
movement, which culminated in the defeat of the General Strike
in 1926. Thereafter the progressive forces were fragmented and
weakened. There had not been a plague of revolutions following
the Bolshevik one. It was sufficient safeguard for capitalist
interests to isolate and ignore the Soviet Union.
After the Potsdam Conference the Soviet hegemony could not
be ignored by the capitalist countries. It could not be attacked
physically though such threats were made. So a war was launched
by subversive propaganda and economic destabilization measures,
The Cold War which had been unnecessary before 1941 became a
necessary part of capitalist reality after 1945. It is unlikely that
Roosevelt's presence at Potsdam would have altered this situation
significantly. No doubt he would have been more conciliatory in
his conversations with Stalin and the 'Cold War' would have been
eased slowly in, following a period of political ambivalence. But
Roosevelt would have been the political leader of the same
combination of forces in the USA as was Truman. The United
States had emerged from the war as the world's most economically
powerful country. Its war losses had been minimal but its war
gains had been tremendous. Capitalism there, after the crisis of
the 1930s, was confident, rampant and intolerant. Its newly found
assertiveness was reflected subsequently in the electoral victories
of the Republican Party in 1946, in anti-labour legislative and
McCarthy ist political repression but already by 1945 it was
beginning to realize its new identity as the messiah of private
property. The Potsdam Conference, then, marked both the
recognition of Soviet power and the beginning of a campaign by
American capitalism to cut it down to size. Franklin D Roosevelt
214
would have had to accommodate to these developments in much
the same way as Truman and Eisenhower did though he might
have pre-empted Eisenhower s speech of 1961 and warned
Americans in better time of the inordinate power of the military-
industrial complex.
Nuclear Posturing
The last point concerns the impact of the explosion of the first
atomic bomb on 16 July 1945, one day before the Potsdam
Conference opened. President Truman knew that the result
would be known whilst he was at Potsdam. He was told that the
test had been successful on the first day of the Conference. By 21
July, he had received a report on the explosion from General
Groves in New Mexico. The following day he was told by Henry
Stimson. the US Secretary for War, that a bomb would be ready
for use against Japan early in August.
The question of who to inform about the bomb had occupied
the minds of Roosevelt, Churchill and others who knew about its
development. In 1943 President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill
had agreed that "The suggestion that the world should be
informed . . with a view to international agreement regarding its
control and use is not accepted. The matter should continue to be
regarded as of the utmost secrecy; but when a 'bomb' is finally
available it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used
against the Japanese who should be warned that the bombard-
ment will be repeated until they surrender". 7 The Interim
Committee set up by Roosevelt to deal with policies concerning
the production and use of the bomb reached a similar conclusion.
So when Stalin attended Potsdam, he had not been told by
Roosevelt or Churchill that an atomic bomb was being produced.
The issue took on a new urgency during the Conference.
Should Stalin be told or should he learn through its use? If he
should be told, then how? How much should he be told? Should
all the information about the atomic bomb be shared with the
Soviet Union and, therefore, become international property? To
some extent all of these questions were pre-empted by the 1943
decision not to inform the Soviet Union about development or
research phase. From the outset, the atomic bomb was regarded
as the property of the USA and, through affinity, Britain. When
the question of its use was raised, therefore, it was in the context
of protecting the interests of those countries. From the inception
215
of the 1943 Agreement the atomic bomb was regarded as an in-
strument to give the Western powers military superiority over the
Soviet Union. The occasion of the Potsdam Conference, when
the bomb was known to exist but before it had been used, was the
last opportunity for making it international property without
cumbersome complicated control mechanisms.
Two months before the Conference, Henry Stimson, who
chaired the Interim Committee, reflected that the bomb would
strengthen the US position if the Soviet Union developed pre-
tensions in the Far East; that it was a "master card in our hand";
that it would enable the US to regain the diplomatic superiority
which it had lost to the Soviet Union. s Stimson was a liberal who
later changed his mind about the matter. Churchill's equivoca-
tions were of a different order. He was animated by the news of
the explosion and preferred not to inform the Soviet leaders at all
about it. But he soon changed his mind and revelled, in conversa-
tion with his Chief of Staff, Field-Marshall Lord Alanbrooke, in
the use of the bomb to bring the Soviet Union to heel, to restore
the diplomatic equilibrium which he considered had been
distorted during the war. 9 President Truman was delighted by the
news which gave him, he said, an entirely new feeling of
confidence. His aides remarked that he showed a new gusto and
firmness. Churchill confirmed this impression. 10 He too speculated
about the bomb though at this stage it was about whether in
exchange for information about it the Soviet leaders would offer
concessions to settle the Polish, Rumanian and Yugoslav problems.
Thus nuclear posturing had begun.
Nothing would have been easier, given the will, for President
Truman to have approached Marshall Stalin on 18 July 1945, for a
formal meeting to present him with the news of the successful
test, adding that the American government wished to share its
atomic information with the Soviet Union and to collaborate in
developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes. In effect this is
the conclusion Henry Stimson reached in September 1945, on the
point of his retirement as Secretary of State for War. He stated
that "unless the Soviets are voluntarily invited into the partner-
ship upon a basis of co-operation and trust, we are going to
maintain the Anglo-Saxon bloc over against the Soviets in the
possession of this weapon. Such a condition will almost certainly
stimulate feverish activity on the part of the Soviet towards the
development of this bomb in what will in effect be a secret
armament race of a rather desperate character ... To put the
216
matter concisely, I consider the problem of our satisfactory
relations with Russia as not merely connected with but is virtually
dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb . . . ,,n Stimson
was accurate in his estimation but he was too late for the US had
already used atomic bombs twice in Japan and had gloried in the
power of sole possession.
The Americans at Potsdam did not possess the will to share
their findings with their erstwhile ally in war. They did not even
explain the nature of the explosion. Instead, whilst the Heads of
State were waiting for their cars on 24 July at the end of a Plenary
Session, President Truman sauntered over to Stalin by himself
and casually mentioned to him that the US "had a new weapon of
unusual destructive force". The news was dropped like a piece of
gossip. Marshall Stalin said he was glad to hear about it but made
no inquiries and appeared to be disinterested. Churchill asked
Truman, "How did it go?" and was told "He never asked a
question"". Stalin's attitude to the question before the Conference
remained unaltered. The news had no visible effect upon the out-
come of the Conference. So what could have been an occasion of
great historical significance became no more than a footnote in
the gossip columns.
Once the atomic bomb had been produced, used and accumu-
lated and the Cold War had begun in earnest there was no
question of its renunciation by the USA government. At no time
did the Americans wish to relinquish the military superiority they
believed the bomb conferred on them. All plans and proposals to
control nuclear weapons, starting with the Baruch Plan 15 in June
1946 and extending to the Soviet Peace Proposals on 15 January,
1986 to eliminate all nuclear weapons by the year 2000, have
stumbled over this fact.
FOOTNOTES
1. A version of this chapter was read at the International Scientific
Conference on the Fortieth Anniversary of the Potsdam Conference, at
Potsdam, the German Democratic Republic, 18 and 19 July 1985.
2. Russia is for Peace by D N Pritt, pp. 12-13.
3. The Struggle for Europe by Chester Witmot, p. 71 3.
4. Churchill and the Bomb. A Study of Pragmatism, by Ernie Troy, 1984, p. 31 .
5. The New York Times, 24 June 1941 , p. 7.
6. Quoted by Herbert Feis in Between War and Peace, I960, p. 157.
7. Quoted by Feis, op cit, p. 172.
8. ibid, p. 80.
217
9. T Humph in the West by Sir Arthur Bryant.
10. Feis, opcit.p. 179.
11. The Origins of the Cold War 1941-1947 by Walter Lafeber, New York, p. 67.
12. See Russia is for Peace by D N Pritt, 1 951 . chapter VIII for a discussion of
the Baruch proposals.
218
Chapter Nine
The President's Electors
Political Responsibility
The President of the USA has considerable power. He is head
of the American armed forces with authority he cannot delegate.
He appoints his own government so that it reflects his perception
of reality. With a bit of luck he can mould the Supreme Court to
endorse his policies. He may have to argue with Congress though
that depends upon the balance of political forces at the time.
Democratic Presidents have often been able to rely on comfort-
able majorities in the House of Representatives and of Senate.
Whatever the substance may reveal, the form shows a person at
the apex of the power structure making decisions on behalf of the
American people to whom he is also responsible. His power and
prestige are derived from his position as a democratically elected
representative of the whole of the American people.
American Presidents, at least since the end of the Second
World War, have never tired of reminding the world of their
democratic credentials. President Reagan has been especially
active in this respect , usually in order to contrast himself with the
leaders of socialist countries. They have not made distinctions
between themselves and their governments on the one hand and
the American people on the other. When they spoke, their voice
was that of the American people. This contrasts with the critics of
American foreign policy who go out of their way to distinguish
between government and people. The ordinary American people
are rarely blamed for the consequences of America's acts abroad.
Soviet leaders have been particularly concerned to make this
dichotomy, emphasizing that when they are attacking American
imperialism they are not attacking ordinary Americans. The same
has been done in the British Peace Movement, taking care not to
generate anti- Americanism when arousing opposition to the
American government.
This is not the only occasion on which citizens of a country have
been absolved of responsibility for their government's actions.
219
Nazism, and not the German people, was usually blamed for
genocide against the Jews and for the horrors of the Second
World War. In some situations where regimes maintain them
selves solely through the use of military power it might make
sense to split the people from their governments but even there
people are ultimately responsible for the form their government
takes. Where governments and political leaders claim to be
representative of the views of ordinary people, as in the USA it
is analytically incorrect and politically unwise to make such a
distinction. It must be presumed that if a government is allowed
to operate without protest it is either because its citizens do not
want to change it because they agree with it or because they have
withdrawn from protest through disillusionment or fear Either
way involves complicity.
It is plain that in order to understand the political processes of
any country all the components must be viewed as a dialecticallv
related totality. In the case of the USA, its Constitution, in any
event, with its checks and balances, was constructed as a totality
No part makes sense without reference to the other parts An
essential element in it is the electorate for the Constitution was
constructed to vest ultimate power and final responsibilities in
those people with the right to vote. They were given an in-
alienable right to choose, to change their minds and to choose
again and so on. The functioning of the Constitution depends
upon the extent and manner of political involvement of ordinary
American people. In order to understand the body politic of
American society, therefore, it is necessary to know something
about the attitudes of ordinary Americans towards politics the
government, the office of President, to foreign relations in
general and the Soviet Union in particular. The Constitution
distributes powers for the everyday running of American political
lite between the Congress, the Executive and the Courts so that
each has some degree of autonomy but each is ultimately answer-
able to the electorate.
This matter of attributing responsibility is a complicated one
One can understand, given the context of Nazi rule, why German
tamihes closed their curtains and bolted their doors during the
Week of the Broken Glass which started on 9 November 1938
when outside, in an outburst of organized spontaneity, the Nazis
destroyed Jewish property, assaulted and killed Jewish people
But were they not assenting to the crimes by hiding their faces
and containing their opposition? The Nuremburg Trials after the
220
last war showed that the cut-off point for responsibility for govern-
ment actions is by no means clearly defined. Are those who
execute orders as culpible as those who give them? At what level
in the hierarchy of administration were Germans involved in the
transportation of Jews to concentration camps, innocent of the
crime of genocide? Were the railway guards who facilitated their
transportation or the clerks who checked the inventory of confis-
cated Jewish property innocent or guilty of the crime?
The issue is clearer in the case of South Africa today. White
South Africans seemingly identify with the policy of apartheid but
does that mean that every white South African should be treated
as a pariah? Or is there a cut-off point, say at the level of children
where responsibility ceases? But at what age is a person a child
without responsibility? We know from the experience of Soweto
how foolhardy it is to regard children as of no political con-
sequence.
The American Attitude to Politics
There is obviously a prima facie case for implicating the
American people in the processes which result in bellicose anti-
Sovietism and the nuclear arms build-up. I am not suggesting,
however, that the European Peace Movements should start
blaming the American people for their complicity. So long as
there is an opportunity for the US government to step back from
the provocation which could lead to a nuclear war the verdict
must be suspended. If the point of no return is ever reached there
can be no doubt who the guilty people will be for the only
effective way of altering American priorities abroad is through
pressures organized by the Americans themselves. They must be
reminded constantly of their obligations in the world community.
During the summer of 1984, leading up to the Presidential
election in November, I travelled for three months around the
coalfields of central Appalachia in Eastern Kentucky, West
Virginia, Virginia and Northern Tennessee, observing and talking
to ordinary folk, representatives of trade unions, employers,
politicians, teachers of different sorts and research workers. The
experience showed the American people as being essentially
isolationist with little interest in the vast military-industrial
complex which provided the impetus for military superiority. It
was as if these two vital elements in American society were leading
entirely separate lives.
221
The British, of course, do have a problem when visiting and
assessing the USA for they think they know and understand it
before they even get there. This sense of knowing stems from
sharing a common language and literary culture and from the
ideological impact of American films and television soap operas
which familiarize us with the trivia of American family life, the
Mafia and the police. America, for the British, does not contain
variety and contrasts but simply wealthy, corrupt, sensuous jet-
setting families, criminals and over- worked, self-righteous police
detectives.
The problem reveals itself when the British visitor discovers
that Americans are numerous, diverse and distinctly foreign.
Despite the common language and the prevalance of European
heritages, the USA is a foreign country with a culture which is as
alien to the British as those of Central or Eastern Europe. Its
customs, practices and institutions have developed out of the
peculiar conditions which have comprised American history. The
common language creates an illusion; the family stereotype is a
con; the over-worked self-righteous detective is a creation of
over-worked, self-righteous script writers.
The sharpest of these cultural shocks, however, comes from
learning that Americans know relatively little about the lives of
other Americans in other parts of their own country and are not
particularly interested in them except insofar as they have a per-
sonal significance. Coming from a tiny, compact island I expected
to find it difficult to visualize the vastness of the USA, covering
thousands of miles with mountains, plains, forests and deserts, a
variety of climates and a complexity of ethnicity. But my difficulty
seemed to be less than that of many Americans who have only a
vague conception of the totality of their country. They see and
identify with tiny segments, with a state at the most, but usually
with a county or a neighbourhood, a hamlet or the hollow where
they live.
Americans tend not to see themselves as belonging to a vast
complex society delineated by the forces of history. They are
insular and parochial in the sense that they often do not even re-
cognize a world outside their own narrowly prescribed experiences.
Beyond the state borders things get rather blurred. My distinctly
English accent indicated not that I was from a foreign country but
came from "out of state". A foreigner was simply a stranger
driving a car with an "out of state" number plate on it.
One can understand and appreciate local loyalties and commit-
222
ments. 1 admire cultural independence and support national self-
determination. Tt is stimulating to see people determined to
preserve their language and culture. As a Welshman whose
language was suppressed by English colonialism I share in that
determination. It is a commonplace phenomenon in Europe,
particularly in the Balkans and among the Baltic states. The
Soviet Union has within it more than 100 languages which have
been preserved and extended through unrestrained use.
The American variety of loyalties is something different. It
does not concern language, ethnicity or culture. It is more a lack
of interest in what goes on elsewhere, than a commitment to
local, ethnic, community developments. Sadly, its genesis is
isolationism. Its consequence is a USA in a universe with no
neighbours, no international obligations. It starts with a frag-
mented electorate distrustful of any form of government,
certainly cynical about central government, tolerant of corruption
in politics because politics are separated from important subsist-
ance activities. I frequently had conversations with coal miners in
Kentucky who, unmoved, described vote buying as if it were a
normal and legitimate political activity. This attitude permeates
all political persuasions so that even those who describe them-
selves as socialists reject state intervention as a means of solving
economic and social problems because they fail to see state
activity as anything but corrupt and demeaning. American coal
miners whose problems stem directly from exploitation by multi-
national coalowners never consider public ownership as even a
first step towards their resolution.
The cynicism of Americans towards their political processes
causes many of them to withdraw from it altogether. United
States residents of voting age can only vote if they are registered
voters. American blacks have traditionally been reluctant to
register because they have been alienated from politics through
the failure of government to tackle their basic problems. In
eleven Southern States with a relatively high incidence of black
people, only 29.1 per cent of the black population of voting age
were registered in 1960 when Jack Kennedy was elected. This
figure had risen to 58.5 per cent in the 1984 Presidential election
in part because of the Presidential nomination campaign by the
black candidate, Jesse Jackson. Amongst the white population of
voting age in the same states, 61.1 per cent were registered in
1960 and only 66.5 per cent in 1984. In the United Stated as a
whole fractionally over 70 per cent of the population of voting age
223
have been eligible to vote during the last three Presidential
elections. Nowadays black and whites distance themselves from
politics in almost equal proportions. The world outside of their
hollows, their hamlets, their compact neighbourhood communities,
goes on despite them. Indeed for many - nothing matters outside
of the family struggle for subsistence.
Not all the registered voters use their votes. Indeed the
percentage of people of voting age who actually vote has risen
more slowly than the percentage increase in registration, signifying
that an increasing number of people who are not new registra-
tions are dropping out. The percentage of people of voting age
who voted in Presidential elections has risen slowly from 43.6 per
cent in 1920 to 59.1 per cent in 1940 when President Roosevelt
was at the height of his popularity. In the highly contentious
Presidential election of 1 948 when Harry Truman was successful
only 51.1 per cent of the population of voting age bothered to
vote. The percentage rose to 61.4 per cent the next time round in
1952 but fell subsequently until in 1980 it was 52.6 per cent.
The point is that in most Presidential elections almost half of
the electorate do not bother to vote. In the internationally critical
1984 election 81 ,350,000 people eligible to vote did not bother to
participate. Harry S Truman, whose policies sparked off the Cold
War, was endorsed by only 25.3 per of the American electorate in
1948.' President Reagan achieved a landslide victory with the
support of only 31.3 per cent of the voting population.
This level of indifference to elections which have dramatic
international implications is alarming. The USA to the outside
world is not a collection of loosely related, semi-autonomous
states or counties but a totality of a mighty industrial machine in
the vanguard of technological progress, capable of imposing its
will on less powerful countries, of bullying them, of marauding
the world like a latter-day swashbuckling pirate. The Cruise
missiles in Britain and the Pershing missiles in West Germany are
not from Ohio or Maine but from the USA; the naval fleet which
patrols the Persian Gulf and Straits of Hormuz does not belong to
South Carolina; it is an American fleet. The planes which
bombed Libya were American while the military advisers who
operate in El Salvador and Honduras are not West Virginians or
Kentuckians but Americans. The threat to Nicaragua is from the
USA as a totality and not from one part of it.
How the USA holds itself together and conducts itself as a
unified nation in the world is of vital concern throughout the
224
world. It has the power to make or destroy. The political
processes which produce a President, a government, a Congress
can have direct survival consequences for families more than 3000
miles away across the Atlantic Ocean. They have already been
decisive for so many families in Vietnam, in the Middle East and
Latin America.
Now if the Flemish in Belgium or the Serbs in Yugoslavia or the
Welsh in Britain concentrate on studying their navels it is of their
concern with only minor implications for the wider world. But if
the residents of Texas or Tennessee ignore the Federal political
processes which produce government decision-makers and fail to
see that across the oceans there are people just like themselves
who want to live and let live, then they are evading an enormous
social responsibility for whether they participate or not, under-
stand the issues or not, the US government makes decisions and
deploys its frightening military power.
There is more to this matter than simply a refusal to vote.
Many Americans know little about the outside world. It has
become fashionable in recent years for American tourists to take
sentimental journeys in search of their roots but this is more of a
fetish than a concern about their original Europeon communities.
When the immigrants arrived from Europe in the 19th and early
20th centuries they consciously cut their roots for themselves and
their descendants. Some had an antipathy towards their original
countries which has been perpetuated. Many Russian immigrants
who escaped the brutality of Czarist Russia have transferred their
hatred of Russia into anti-Sovietism without regard for changing
circumstances. Facts have not mattered. Indeed in their circums-
cribed communities, served by local, parochial newspapers which
are often on the level of church magazines, and dependent for
world news on truncated and partial television reports, the
American public is largely unaware of events, people and
sensibilities beyond their borders. Except for the occasional 'on
the spot' television report, which is tailored for them anyway,
Americans rely on information acquired through military service
but even this suffers from the influence of ethnocentricity.
There is a renewed interest in American academic circles in the
Vietnam War. Questions are being raised about its consequences
after more than a decade of silence but they are all about the
psychology of Vietnam veterans and not about the Vietnamese
people. Even after inflicting such horrendous damage on the
communities of Vietnam, Americans focus their minds only on
225
the rehabilitation of their defeated army. Other, earlier wars have
been distorted through lapses of memory. This is particularly the
case with the Second World War. Polls have shown that many
American children believe that the Soviet Union fought with the
Nazis against the USA in that war. This, of course, is consistent
with the present portrayal of the Soviet Union as the enemy.
Some distortions are just plainly bizarre. I was present in July
1984 in a Federal Court in Pikeville, Kentucky to hear a case
brought against a Local of the United Mine Workers of America
under the Taft-Hartley Act. The Local had called a strike which
the coal employer claimed was in contravention of the Act. The
Local, on the other hand, said that the employer had provoked
the strike so that it would be fined and made bankrupt. The
provocation is the crucial bit of the anecdote. The mine had
relatively recently been bought by Royal Dutch Shell and on the
occasion of a visit to the mine by Shell directors from Holland the
management flew the Dutch flag alongside the Stars and Stripes
of the USA. This was offensive to the miners in two ways. First,
the Dutch flag was not flown the regulation distance below the
American flag and, secondly, the miners refused to work under
the flag of a country which they alleged was communist and had
fought against them in the Second World War. This information
had been passed on to them by veterans of that War. The Judge
was unable to adjudicate on such a delicate question of patriotism
and passed the case on to another court.
The 1984 Presidential election did not even excite interest as a
television spectacle. While the world's eyes followed the events
from the primaries to Party Conventions, to the hustings and
television debates the American public was plainly bored and
preferred soap operas. When people do not fully and genuinely
participate in the political processes they allow politics to become
trivialized, distorted, even corrupted. It was sickening to think
that the possibility of detente between the Soviet Union and the
USA or the survival of an independent Socialist Nicaragua might
depend on the publicity given to the credibility of the tax returns
of Mr John Zaccaro, the husband of Geraldine Ferraro the
Democratic Party's Vice-Presidential candidate or the vague,
unsubstantiated Mafia connections of Mrs Ferraro's husband's
father in the 1950s or President Reagan's hesitancy in a television
debate or his stumble on the steps of an aircraft. Not even the
very real social problems of the USA were aired. Such trivializing
was an obscenity.
226
Consensus and Community Protests
The American language of politics expresses the overwhelming
dominance of consensus politics. Communism and Socialism are
not terms to be raised, even for denigration or refutation. The
label nearest these forbidden categories is 'liberal', associated
with the reforms of Roosevelt's New Deal period. But according
to a New York Times and CBS News poll in November 1984 it was
a political disadvantage even to carry that label. Fifteen per cent
TABLE IX 3
POLITICAL LABELS: WHICH ONES STICK?
The New York Times/CBS News/Poll
The percentage of Americans who said a given label would make
them think better or worse of a public figure. For most groups,
the percentages were close to those of the entire population but
Southern whites, union members, the elderly and those with low
and high family incomes differed from the average.
Income
Total
Southern
Union
65 years
Under
$50,000
whites
members
and older
$12,500
and up
Liberal
Better
15
12
16
19
16
11
Worse
17
26
7
14
12
28
Moderate
Better
21
23
17
37
25
23
Worse
6
9
8
6
3
8
Conservative
Better
27
35
22
35
29
30
Worse
13
12
16
7
9
18
Populist
Better
6
5
7
8
6
6
Worse
21
28
24
20
21
22
Progressive
Better
37
44
30
45
37
37
Worse
7
8
8
5
7
9
Based on telephone interviews with 1,659 adults, Nov. 6-10, 1984.
227
of those polled thought better of politicians described as 'liberal'
but seventeen per cent thought worse of them. The most popular
political labels were 'moderate', 'conservative' and 'progressive'. 2
The meaning of the labels varied, depending on whether the
questions were asked of southern whites, union members,
pensioners or people with high or low incomes, but, except for
the liberal label, the variations were not significant. The
ideological dice, as the above table indicates, is loaded in support
of capitalism.
The American electorate tends not only to think differently
about politics compared to its British counterpart, but to express
itself differently in institutional terms. Although American
society is economically polarised with a rich elite of employers
and a wide base of poverty in the manner of other capitalist
societies this is not reflected in institutionalized politics. The
working class has no formal presence in American politics. The
interests of neither the poor and underprivileged in general nor
the substantial minorities of blacks and hispanics in particular are
represented in Congress in institutional forms. The approach to
equality, poverty and deprivation is an ad hoc, individualistic
one, dependent upon the presence of sympathetic persons in
political positions. In consequence, there are no systematic,
organized expressions of opposition to the capitalist system
within the legitimate framework of political activity. There are no
open debates about alternative forms of society and no rhetoric
challenging the dominant ideology. The discussion is concen-
trated on the centre and right of political options within a
common conceptual framework.
The American workers do not use trade unions as a forum for
political opposition as do British workers. Trade unionism was
extensive and influential during President Roosevelt* s New Deal
period but since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and
the enforcement in 20 States of oppressive Right to Work laws
organized labour has become a declining rump. The percentage
of the workforce organized by unions has fallen from about 50 in
1946 to about 18 in 1987. The distribution of organized workers is
very uneven between states and industries, leaving many areas
virtually untouched by unions. They are strongest in such
industries as coal mining, iron and steel, docking and automobile
production. They are, therefore, most significant in New York,
West Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio
and Indiana which are old-established centres of industry. But
228
these are areas of declining industry. Moreover, notwithstanding
the decline, the frontiers of trade unionism are being pushed back
in those industries by aggressive employers and repressive laws.
Nowadays only about 65 per cent of American coal miners are
organized and they account for less than 50 per cent of total coal
production. American workers had a similar experience in the
1920s and they will doubtless recover as they did then. But in the
meantime the combination of a serious membership decline with
a commitment to the capitalist system has undermined even their
role as pressure groups.
The most extensive form of oppositional politics is through
community protest groups covering a range of environmental and
peace issues. There has been a proliferation of 'Concerned
Citizens' associations and 'Community Preservation' groups
protesting about strip-mining, chemical pollution, offences
against Native Americans and the unrestrained anti-social activi-
ties of multi-national companies in general. There are up to 100
national peace groups, focussing on particular aspects of the
peace issue such as nuclear testing, S.D.I. , or the protection of
jobs. And there are many more local peace groups organizing
demonstrations and marches, and linking up with protest groups
over American involvement in Nicaragua and EI Salvador. There
is a plethora of groups agitating for a Hands Off Nicaragua'
policy just as in the late 1960s there were many calling for peace
in Vietnam. At community level in the U.S. political action is
multifarious and extensive.
The main characteristics of community politics are its source of
weakness. It is primarily single issue protest, fragmented and
without any ideological basis. It can, therefore, be relatively
easily defused. The end of the Vietnam War also signalled the end
of protests about American imperialism until the campaign
against the U.S. government's involvement in Nicaragua was
launched. When the U.S. leaves Nicaragua to determine its own
future the public interest in imperialism will again subside until
such time as it hurts the American conscience. That is the manner
of protest politics. A conciliatory gesture by the U.S. govenment
towards the Soviet Union would calm down peace protests; a test
ban or a nuclear freeze would convince many Americans to
disband their groups. The Peace Movement could expire without
having touched the causes of the nuclear arms build-up. The
reason for this characteristic of community protest action is that it
is not about causes but only their visible manifestations. The
229
action is taken, not because of an analytical understanding of the
politics of government or multi-national companies but through a
dislike of some consequences of their behaviour. Community
protests, therefore, have no permanence though their causes are
endemic.
American society is not static or permanent in its present form
despite the longevity of its two-party system and its aggressive
endorsement of capitalism. The social forces which act on its
electorate are continually reshaping its attitudes. Sometimes the
changes re-inforce the system as did the rise of the Moral
Majority Movement in the late 1970s and the longer-run decline
in trade unionism. At other times the contradictions which
inexorably beset the system predominate and produce new
political alignments. The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s did
not remove the causes of discrimination against American blacks
but it did raise their political consciousness so that they more
readily identify with oppressed peoples in Third World countries.
The correlation of Third World problems with the arms race has
taken many of them into the Peace Movement. The rapidly
growing population of hispanics provides natural allies for the
people of Nicaragua and encourages a sympathetic relationship
with the Soviet Union which gives material support to Nicaragua.
Women, engaged in their own struggles, form the basis of the
Peace Movement and seek detente with the Soviet Union. These
changes are giving a wider meaning to community protest action
and are encouraging the process of unification. One manifestation
of the process was the formation of the Rainbow Coalition in
April, 1986, under the influence of Dr Jesse Jackson. Delegates
from groups in 42 states attended its inauguration and supported
peace initiatives with the Soviet Union. The Rainbow Coalition is
as yet merely a tendency within the Democratic Party but it is
linking up with the main U.S. Peace Organizations and may
eventually form the basis for a national political opposition. All-
in-all, the American electorate is slowly, almost unknown to
itself, being converted to a new awareness of its world responsibili-
ties.
FOOTNOTES
1 . All of the election figures are published in the yearly Statistical Abstract of the
United States and in America Votes. A Handbook of Contemporary American
Election Statistics, published every two years by the Flections Research
Center, Congressional Quarterly, Washington.
2. The New York Times, 24 November, 1984.
3. ibid.
230
Chapter Ten
The President's Advisers
Institutional Policy-Making
Once the American electorate chooses a President how
influential is he in formulating foreign policy? Who is it who
dreams up the marauding, vandalizing military escapades which
have so often characterized American policies since the end of
the Second World War? Who is it who says crush any attempt
anywhere to challenge US hegemony? Who says destabilize
Chile, invade Grenada, intervene in the Lebanon, crush the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua, support reaction in El Salvador, bomb
Libya and assassinate Colonel Gadafi? Who, in much broader
terms, sets the parameters for a policy of containment of the
Soviet Union and within them decides to harbour pre-emptive
strike intentions?
There is no doubt that the President of the USA is vested with
sufficient formal political and military powers to make all these
decisions himself. But he operates within a political context of
control specified by the American Constitution. This inhibits
certain acts of military aggression and imposes financial con-
straints on overseas military activities. The President has to carry
the American Congress with him in general but in matters
concerning the Soviet Union this has never been a problem. More
often than not Congress has been a more willing Soviet hunter
than the President. All proposals designed as responses to a
Soviet threat and have sailed through Congress. A plan to give
aid to a Western supported government in Greece in 1947 fell flat
in Congress until the Under-Secretary, Dean Acheson, said it was
in response to"an eager and ruthless opponent."' 1 This scenario
was repeated many times, resulting in the financing of NATO,
SEATO, biiateral treaties with Japan, Korea and Taiwan at an
annual cost of millions of dollars. The Federal coffers were
generously open for military programmes and military allies.
Congress responded most eagerly when it came to action against
the Soviet Union or its allies. Ft supported constraints on East-
West trade, the passing of the Export Control Act of 1949 to
231
regulate American exports and the Battle Act of 1951 to
discourage American allies from selling strategic goods. It has
always quickly endorsed military action against allies of the
Soviet Union, for instance, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Grenada
In recent years, since the Vietnam War experience, Congress has
been more guarded in its anti-Soviet reflexes but the effect has
been to scale down rather than stop action.
Given the willingness of Congress to pursue anti-Soviet policies
the President has been given much freedom to develop initiatives
without prior Congress approval. Indeed, one political commen-
tator noted that such "a wealth of precedent has been established,
through a dozen years of successive crises, that in the world-wide
confrontation with communism it was for the president to set the
policy, the Congress to support it." 2 How did he, therefore, go
about setting the policy? Well, firstly, he did it within the very
severe constraints set by the needs of American capitalism. It was
never a case of collaborating with the Soviet Union but of altering
the methods of containment, of shifting emphases. These
emphases, of course, were important and ranged from detente to
plain military pugnacity, from the negotiation of treaties to their
abrogation, through degrees of Cold War. In the age of nuclear
weapons where the President is the Chief of the American armed
forces and controls the trigger, a difference in emphasis can mean
the difference between a nuclear war or not.
Each of the eight American Presidents since 1945 have
operated within an institutional policy-making framework which
they have used, adopted or altered according to their own whims.
Each President takes over the procedures of his predecessor and
fits them for his own use. Within the field of foreign policy there
are three sets of institutional interest. There is the Central
Intelligence Agency with a high degree of autonomy to pursue
peripheral issues; the State and Defense Departments, staffed by
career officials with their own resource materials and bureau-
cratic interests; and the White House itself containing the
President and his entourage of advisers. These agencies some-
times project different, contradictory policies, even to the point
of cancelling each other's effect. The CIA, of course, is a covert
organization so that the public disagreements emanate from the
State and Defense Departments and the Pentagon. The President
has the last word in such cases but he may only be able to paper
over the cracks. The eight Presidents have vacillated in their
preferences.
232
In 1947 President Truman established the National Security
Council run bv a National Security Assistant, in the White
House The contenders for the ear of the President have thus
been the National Security Assistant, the Secretary of State and
to a lesser extent, the Secretary of Defense. The President, of
course, appointed each one, but the National Security Assistant
has become a pivotal position with a relatively easy access to the
President, able to accumulate influence and to assume the role of
the premier adviser. Henrv Kissinger was the classic case of the
premier adviser when he was the National Security Assistant to
President Nixon. The changes in the relationships between
policv-making agencies have largely involved reducing the status
of the National Security Assistant in relation to the Secretary of
State and then building it up again. Much then depended m this
struggle upon the personalities involved and the advisers with
whom each was able to surround himself.
The President chooses his Executive, or government, and all
his principal advisers. Usually a new President replaces the whole
upper layer of officials concerned with foreign affairs and
defense, from members of the Cabinet, the National Security
Assistant and his staff down to assistant secretaries and even
lower in some instances. He is not constrained in his choice by
political party affiliations. He can, and often does, go outside ot
political parties to industry, banks and universities for candidates.
He may not have any particular source except his friends, as in
the case of President Reagan. By and large Presidents have gone
to manufacturing and finance institutions for people with executive
talent and to universities for advisers. The universities, particularly
the elite Ivy League ones, have served the Presidency well. The
Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, the economic historian W
W Rostow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Eugene Staley the Stanford University economist, McGeorge
Bundy, the Dean of Humanities at Harvard University, Henry
Kissinger, the specialist in international relations at Harvard
University and the Soviet specialist Zbigniew Brzezmski have all
achieved "notoriety as advisers.
The Classic Role of Academics
But what exactly do they contribute? Firstly, the majority of
American Presidents have been virtually ignorant of foreign
affairs. Only Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon had any prior
233
experience of international affairs. Eisenhower's experience
came as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe
during the Second World War and as head of NATO in 1951-52.
Nixon acquired experience during his eight years as Vice-
President to Eisenhower. The rest had been either Senators or
State Governors. They desperately needed advice in well-
packaged briefings or, as with President Reagan, in easily
understood video recordings. The nature of the advice varied
with the personality of the President. Three Presidents, Truman,
Eisenhower and Nixon each wanted a clearly articulated general
policy towards the Soviet Union which would provide answers to
ad hoc issues. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter pursued
pragmatic policies and therefore required detailed assessments of
issues as they arose. Kennedy, for example, modified his position
after the Cuban missile crisis as Carter did after Soviet troops
entered Afghanistan. President Reagan, mistaking a "rhetorical
stance for strategy" 3 is more dependent upon script-writers than
advisers.
But whether they provided the broad sweep policy, packaged
like the Truman Doctrine, or, for example, a highly detailed
assessment of Soviet influence in Mozambique, the academic
advisers gave theoretical legitimation for the dominant ideas in
American capitalist society. They added different glosses to the
same product, The slogans and cliches which rolled off the
tongues of Presidents and their Press Secretaries, the slick public
relations expressions of foreign policy, the justifications for
foraging into some foreign country such as 'defending the free
world', 'protecting democracy' and 'preserving the American way
of life', all have had their bases in the theorizing of foreign policy-
specialists in universities and research institutes.
The classical role of academics is to serve the status quo
through formulating complex erudite theories and explanations
no matter how cruel and oppressive the system might be. The
killings in Chile, the mining of Nicaraguan harbours, the
genocidal attacks on Vietnam, the bombing of Libya all have
their theoretical justification in the theses of American
academics. This point was made more explicitly by Andre
Gunder Frank in his article "The Sociology of Development and
Underdevelopment of Sociology' 1 . 5 He wrote: "Roosevelt's and
Kennedy's brains trusts co-opted all sorts of American social
scientists. Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr's aid to the
development of underdeveloped countries has so far consisted in
234
writing the now famous White Paper on Cuba which was intended
to justify the coming invasion of that country at the Bay of Pigs.
He later admitted lying about the invasion in the "national
interest". Stanford economist Eugene Staley wrote The Future of
Underdeveloped Countries and then planned it in the renowned
Staley - (General Maxwell) Taylor Plan to put 15 million
Vietnamese in the concentration camps they euphemistically
christened "strategic hamlets". Since the failure of that effort at
development planning, MIT economic historian Walt Whitman
Rostow has escalated the effort by writing The Stages of
Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. He wrote of
these stages at the CIA - financed Center for International
Studies on the Charles River and has been operationalizing them
on the Potomac as President Johnson's chief adviser on Vietnam.
It is on behalf of economic growth that Rostow has become the
principal architect of escalation, from napalming the South to
bombing the North and beyond . . . Meanwhile, after performing
his role as Dean of Humanities at Harvard University, McGeorge
Bundy becomes W W Rostow's superior in Washington, and goes
on television to explain to the misguided and incredulous why this
economic development theory and policy is humanitarian . .
Gunder Frank, whose concern is with developing countries,
stated that "the American social scientific way of life . . . has its
own essential role in the imperialist exploitation, oppression, and
underdevelopment of the majority of mankind." 6 He was, in fact,
writing about academics in general. Rarely do they bite the hand
that feeds them. They endorse the legitimacy of free, private
enterprise and facilitate its survival. They damn as unworthy,
oppressive, brutal, anything which gets in its way. And they do it
all so cleverly, in moderated tones and footnoted texts. And in
case their readers begin to ask disturbing questions they avoid the
sticky ones, like the parts played by military-industrial complexes
and the social consequences of their actions. Somewhere in the
Pentagon Files there must be a memorandum explaining the
effectiveness of theatre nuclear war as a means of dampening the
ardour of the Soviet Union.
Detente or Containment
The President's advisers on Soviet policy base their analyses,
and therefore their advice, on assumptions about the Soviet
Union. They would claim, of course, that whatever they assume
235
is derived from the behaviour of the Soviet Union and does not
need to be verified. Indeed the time has long since past when
statements about the Soviet Union have to be substantiated by
empirical evidence. The assumptions they make are consistent
with the dominant capitalist view of communism and, therefore
tTc a ^u he contentl ° n that the So viet Union is the enemy of the
USA. The policy options which follow from this are limited and
obvious.
Academic advisers are invariably specialists in one aspect or
other of foreign relations who have written extensively on their
subjects It is possible, therefore, to discover their attitudes and
within them, to identity their biases. But this would be an
arduous and rather tedious process. Professor Joseph S Nve Jnr
professor of government at Harvard University has simplified the
task by putting together the views of 13 advisers about different
aspects of US relations with the Soviet Union in a single volume
In a book called The Making of America's Soviet Policy 1 13 hifih
ranking academics who have served as advisers covering the
period from 1945 till 1984 explain their views succinctly and to the
point. Eight of the essayists are from Harvard University
American Presidents, despite their own origins, seem to hold a
common view about the source of intellectual excellence All of
the contributors deal with American-Soviet relationships from
the point of view of American policy-making institutions. Each
one postulates the Soviet Union as an enemy. The task of
American foreign policy then has to be to disarm, contain
weaken and, maybe, as a last resort, to destroy the Soviet Union
he adv.ee is always concerned, therefore, with deterring
destabilizing and direct confrontation .
The advisers thus limit themselves, in effect, to two options;
either to seek accommodation through detente or to contain the
Soviet Union through military superiority. The essays are
pervaded by a suspicion of detente. One contributor. Robert R
Bowie, a scholar with an illustrious record as an adviser, formerly
Director of the Harvard Center for International Affairs
described the "Nixon detente" as the most costly mistake in post-
war American strategy, along with the Vietnam War. 8 Another
contributor Stanley Hoffmann, chairman of the Center for
European Studies at Harvard University put the issue more
explicitly. -But once detente is", he wrote, "so to speak, in orbit
the ,ssue becomes one of preventing the Soviets from, or
punishing them tor, doing hostile things, and the tools first used
236
as goads must now be used as possible sanctions, the carrots must
become sticks . . ." 9 Detente, Hoffmann argued, began to be
seen as appeasement. He added: ''What made this view fashion-
able way beyond the conservative and neo conservative fringe?
was a combination of three factors. One was the worry about the
changes in the strategic balance ... A second factor was growing
indignation at Soviet human rights violations ... A third one was
the evidence of fiascos abroad: in South East Asia, in southern
Africa . . ." I0 One of the lessons Hoffmann drew from an
analysis of detente, and presumably this would be listed as a
policy recommendation, was to "be modest in our expectation
about Soviet behaviour . . . It is not in our interest to make of the
Soviet Union a partner in the settlement of conflict far removed
from its area of vital interests. It is not in our interest to sign
vague statements of principle. It is not likely that trade can ever
become a major factor in Soviet- American relations . . ." u And
so the recommendations were handed from one adviser to
another.
If this is the view about detente, then what about the
alternative option: containment through strength? The logic of
this option means not simply nuclear superiority but destroying
every visible evidence of the spread of Soviet influence, wherever
it is found - in other words, repressing progressive movements.
And just as attempts to quell domestic communism spill over to
become generally repressive of progressive movements because
of the difficulty of identifying communism as a social force, so
international anti-communism becomes general and indiscriminate
repression. Any country which attempts to distance itself from
the hegemony of American capitalism becomes a target. Libya
has suffered largely for this reason. Nicaragua, Mozambique and
Angola are other targets of US hostility. Tiny Grenada was
invaded for its affront to the USA. Ordinary people suffer; they
may be killed; their environments are shattered. The costs can be
horrendous as the millions of dead and injured Vietnamese
testify. Seen in this light the alternative to detente has no moral
basis: it is plainly evil.
The academic advisers who wend their way through the leafy
suburbs of bourgeois America, with their briefcases containing
their precious Soviet policy memoranda, are not paid to count
social costs. Their task is to provide options. It is governments
which choose. They would, in any event, be abhorred by the
suggestion that they were in any sense responsible for devastating
237
ordinary people's lives, for underpinning the script of 'Rambo' as
single-handedly he rampages against communists. But that is
precisely what they are doing. Not, of course, on their own. The
basis of American foreign policy is to protect the international
rights of private capital, which, in effect, means the interests of
multi-national companies. The President's advisers compound
the pressures which those interests generate and which comprise
the military-industrial complex. They provide respectable cover.
The origin of international tyranny, however, is not wholly
institutional. Many individuals, whose lives may seemingly be
otherwise unblameworthy contribute to it. They, as well as vast
institutions, have a moral responsibility for the'eonsequences of
their actions.
FOOTNOTES
1- Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department by Dean
Achcson, 1969, p. 219.
2 ' Cdine md ReSUrgmCe of ?°W&$ by James L Sundquist, 1981.
3. "The President and the Executive Branch" bv Robert R Bowie, in The
Makmg of America's Soviet Policy, ed by Joseph S Nye Jr, 1984, p 67
J his is an informative if biased account.
4. I am not suggesting that only American academies engage in this practice
No matter what the society, academics generally, though not invariably
engage in it though most do not really know that thev are doing it
5. hirst publ.shed in the Summer, 1967 issue of Catalvst and reprinted
numerously. It ,s taken here from Latin America: Underdevelopment or
Revolution by Andre Gunder Frank, 1969. p. 28.
6. Critique^and Anti-Critique. Essays on Dependence and Reformism by
Andre Gunder Frank, 1984, p. 19. y
7. The Making of America's Soviet Policy edited by Joseph S Nye Jr A
Council on Foreign Relations Book, Yale University Press. 1984
o, ibid, p. 91.
9, ibid, p. 248.
10. ibid, pp. 256-7.
U. ibid, p. 260.
238
Chapter Eleven
The President's Masters 1
The Valedictory Speech of President Eisenhower
When in January 1961, Dwight D Eisenhower left his office
after two terms as President of the USA it was expected that the
old soldier would engage in a bit of sentimental leave-taking and
slip quietly away for a game of golf. Much to the surprise of
political commentators in Washington he did not do this but
instead launched a bitter criticism of the military leaders and arms
manufacturers who had shaped his foreign policies;
Although Eisenhower was a Republican President he had been
courted by the Democratic Party which would dearly have liked
to have him as its presidential candidate in 1948 instead of Harry
S Truman. There was, in those days, little difference at least in
the foreign policies of the two parties. Eisenhower continued the
Cold War policies of Truman though in a more conservative
manner. His tenure, though interspersed with dramatic domestic
and international events, was not characterized by intelligent,
independent political decision-making. He was ranked as average
by a group of historians who had been asked to rate Presidents of
the USA according to their performances. 2
President Eisenhower was sternly anti-communist and in his
discussions with his successor, John F Kennedy, he listed "the
continuing Communist Threat to the West" as one of the
foremost problems facing him. 3 He accepted the National
Security Council Document 68 produced in 1950 at Truman's
request which portrayed the Soviet Union as an implacably
hostile, expansionist military threat which had to be countered by
an expanded Western conventional and nuclear military force.
More than Truman, he played down conventional arms and
treated nuclear weapons as part of the arsenal to be employed
wherever they could be militarily and politically useful. 4 He had
been willing to use covert means to resist the spread of
communism in Third World countries. In Iran in 1953, Eisenhower
directed the CIA to topple the Premier Mohammed Mossadeq
239
and install the Shah in his place, which it did. The following year,
when the CTA informed Eisenhower that the legitimate government
of Guatemala was communist in its composition and policies he
toppled it by military force and then went on television to tell the
American people "that communism's first foothold in the hemis-
phere had been halted by an uprising of freedom-loving
Guatemalans". 5 The CIA displayed its new found status and
power under Eisenhower when it opened its vast new offices in
Langley, Virginia in 1959.
The Soviet achievement in launching Sputnik 1 in October 1957
shocked the American people. "Overnight," it was reported,
"there developed a widespread fear that the country lay at the
mercy of the Russian military machine and that our own
government and its military arm had abruptly lost the power to
defend the mainland itself . . ." A American spending on space
and missile research escalated. Already, at the beginning of
Eisenhower's Presidency, following the end of the Korean war,
the defence budget had been tripled. In his final budget statement
it was announced that US spending on defence had reached a
peacetime record. 7 He left a considerable legacy: "a substantial
military and space programme that would reach fruition under
later administrations, and also the foundations of a policy on
outer space that would guide future U.S. presidents for many
years.
President Eisenhower gave little indication during his tenure of
an awareness of problems in the international capitalist power
structure. He refused to support Britain's imperialist venture
during the Suez crisis of 1956 but given America's own role in
Latin America and the Far East that was plain hypocracy. He had
had several opportunities during the Congressional debates over
defence programmes in his second term to express his concern
about the way in which private profit-making exploited the
interests of national security but had said nothing apart from an
occasional cryptic remark at his news conferences that "obviously
something besides the strict military needs of this country are
coming to influence decisions". 9
In a variety of ways Eisenhower consolidated the power of
American capital. He refrained from publicly criticizing Senator
Joseph McCarthy in his witch-hunt of communists and allowed
him a free-ride. He permitted the harassment of Robert J
Oppenheimcr, the scientist most responsible for constructing the
first atomic bomb, for his dissenting opinions and past association
240
with communists. And he failed to respond to widespread
national and international pressure to grant clemency to Ethel
and Julius Rosenberg in 1953, sentenced to death for allegedly
passing secret information on the production of atomic bombs to
the Soviet Union. In general. President Eisenhower disliked
political dissent because, he argued, it provided communists with
contentious issues to exploit.
Halfway through his second-term of office, Eisenhower decided
to expose'the influence of the post-war complex of power-holders
in the USA, but to do so in his last major speech when, of course,
it was too late for him either to do anything about it or to face the
repercussions. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the derogatory
treatment of dissenting views by American society at that time.
The sociologist. C. Wright Mills, had described the locus of
power in American capitalism in 1959 when he wrote: "Within
American society, major national power now resides in the
economic, the political, and the military domains . . . The
economv-once a scatter of small production units in autonomous
balance-has become dominated by two or three hundred giant
corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which
together hold the kevs to economic decisions . . . The military
order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by
state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature
of covernment . . ." 10 C Wright Mills was both distrusted by the
establishment and discriminated against in his own University
because of his opinions. Yet what he wrote was a mild
observation compared to the televised valedictory speech made
by President Eisenhower from the White House on 17 January
1961, three days before he finally relinquished office. Quite
clearly Eisenhower's speechwriter, Malcolm Moss, should have
been his political advisor. Eisenhower said:
"America is today the strongest, the most influential
and most productive nation in the world. Undoubtedly
proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's
leadership and prestige depend ... on how we use our
power in the interests of world peace and human
betterment. ...
We face a hostile ideology - global in scope, atheistic
in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in
method .... But threats, new in kind or degree,
constantly arise. Of them I mention only two. A vital
241
clement in keeping the peace is our military establish-
ment . . . Until the latest of our world conflicts, the
United States had no armaments industry . . . We have
been compelled to create a permanent armaments
industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a
half million men and women arc directly engaged in the
defense establishment. We annually spend on military
security alone more than the net income of all United
States corporations.
Now this conjunction of an immense military establish-
ment and a large arms industry is new in the American
experience. The total influence - economic, political,
even spiritual - is felt in every city, every state house,
every office of the Federal Government. We recognize
the imperative need for this development. Yet wc must
not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil,
resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very
structure of our society.
In the councils of Government we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, of the military - industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination
endanger our liberties or democratic process. We
should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and
knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper
meshing of the huge industrial and military machine of
defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that
security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to and largely responsible for the sweeping
changes in our industrial-military fortune has been the
technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution research has become central. It
also becomes more formalized, complex and costly. A
steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the
direction of the Federal Government . . . The prospect
of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal
employment, project allocations and the power of
money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovering in
respect ... we must be alert to the equal and opposite
242
danger that public policy could itself become the
captive of a scientific-technological elite . ." n
President Eisenhower s warning went unheeded. It was in any
event too late. His statement was about a special case of the
power of monopoly capital which in one vital respect was a
deviation from the norm. For the first time in American history,
government had become the executive not merely of a bourgeois
class which was motivated by personal profit-making but by one
which sought profit from war. More importantly, as conventional
arms were displaced as prime weapons by nuclear missiles the
profits were sought from means which could lead to the
annihilation of the world. This process had begun with the
Manhatten Project in 1945 but was leisurely until the Soviet
Union had tested its first bomb in 1949. As the Soviet Union had
no means of launching an atomic bomb for another decade the
pressure on the US to accumulate nuclear weapons was not great.
The Rhetoric of Presidents
The mood of America, changed by the launching of Sputnik I,
was heightened by the Cuban crisis in 1962. After his inaugura-
tion in January' 1961, immediately following Eisenhower's
speech, John Kennedy started a rapid acceleration of nuclear
arms production. The feasibility of a limited nuclear war was
discussed. And although the balance of nuclear military power
lay overwhelmingly with the USA in 1962, the Cuban crisis
caused the President to accelerate even further the production of
space and nuclear missiles. This arms building spree was in the
services of a rampant imperialism. The USA, by 1959, had a total
of 275 major base complexes in 31 countries and more than 1,400
foreign bases, counting all sites where Americans were then
stationed and sites designed for emergency occupation. The bases
were manned by approximately a million American troops. 12 The
USA was a member of NATO and the South-East Asia Treaty
Organization and had bilateral treaties with dozens of countries
as a means of isolating and containing communism. It was
increasingly implicated in trying to prevent the Vietnamese from
obtaining independence. As the conflict with Vietnam unfolded
the armaments manufacturers were given a real war to exploit.
The rate of consumption of US ammunition during a peak month
of the Vietnam WaT was greater than for a comparable period in
243
the Second World War or the Korean War. 13 The 1973 Yom
Kippur War in the Middle East prompted a further expansion in
the US ammunition base as the Americans speeded up supplies to
the Israelis. From 1970 to 1978 the army alone spent $1.8 billion
on an unprecedented programme of ammunition plant moderniza-
tion.
The rhetoric of the Presidents varied. President Kennedy paled
Eiserhower into insignificance, describing Eisenhower's
mushroomed defence expenditure as complacent, passive and
inadequate. He advocated a global anti-communist role for the
US which re-affirmed the image of the Soviet Union contained in
Truman's National Security Document 68. 14 Kennedy expoused a
"flexible response" tactic with an increase in ground forces, inter-
continental ballistic missiles, Polaris and tactical nuclear
weapons. However, he moderated his approach to the Soviet
Union before he was assassinated. This re-appraisal continued
throughout President Johnson's period of office during which
time there were agreements with the Soviet Union on the 'hot
line', grain sales to the Soviet Union, the Limited Test Ban
Treaty, the Non-proliferation Treaty, plans for strategic arms
talks and 'bridge-building' efforts through trade and com m unci a-
tions with Eastern European socialist countries. Detente was
counterbalanced by the Vietnam War for Presidents Johnson and
Nixon. The rhetoric was placatory. Nixon reaffirmed treaty
commitments and the nuclear deterrence but destabilized whenever
he could, as in Chile, and sought to strengthen the position of the
USA through links with China. President Ford, who filled in after
President Nixon had been impeached, relied wholly on Nixon's
Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and continued Nixon's
balancing act. President Carter started his tenure in 1976 in a
conciliatory mood, trying to gain the acceptance of the second
Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, SALT-2, by the US
Congress. The agreement was never submitted to the US Senate
for ratification and Carter asked for it to be taken off the Senate's
calendar after Soviet troops had moved into Afghanistan in
December, 1979. By that time US opinion had begun to harden
against the Soviet Union and along with it went President Carter.
The US administration, still following Trumen's NSC Document
68, saw the Soviet hand in the national liberation movements
which were spreading in Africa and Latin America. President
Carter, trying to match the stridently anti-Soviet rhetoric of
Ronald Reagan in his Presidential campaign, signed Directive 59
244
in July 1980. which marked the abandonment of deterrence and
gave priority to a first-strike capability. By the time of the
Presidential Election in 1980 there was little to distinguish
between the policies of the two main candidates. However, the
winner's rhetorical belligerence, his public preference for in-
creased expenditure on arms, his hostility towards national
liberation movements, his predilection for ignoring treaties and
his endeavour to take the arms race into space, marked him off
from his predecessors. President Reagan reflected an accumula-
tion of the most bellicose phases of post-war Presidents.
The background to the rhetoric, however, no matter how shrill,
was similar for all the Presidents. Frequently their rhetoric was
not matched by corresponding policies. The conciliatory tones
did not halt the research, planning and development of nuclear,
chemical and conventional weapons, nor did implacably hostile
attitudes necessarily indicate that preparations were underway to
wage war. Presidents were pragmatic in their responses, changing
them like the wind and rarely getting their acts together. Under
President Reagan, for example, there was a greatly increased
arms programme but without a consistent strategy so that he
opposed the Siberian oil pipeline yet promoted grain sales to the
Soviet Union.
US Expenditure on Arms
The backcloth to this background was the extent to which
military expenditure cut into the US gross national product. The
USA consistently diverted more of its resources to military uses
than any other "Western capitalist country. In 1983, the US
expended at least twice as much of its GNP on military
production as any other capitalist country, apart from the UK,
Greece and Portugal. The variations in the proportion of the
GNP devoted to arms generally reflected America's imperialist
activities. It was high under John F Kennedy because of the fear
generated by the launching of Sputnik I, the Cuban crisis and
heightening international tension. It remained high during the
years of detente with the Soviet Union because of the Vietnam
War and fell sharply once the Americans began to pull out. The
proportion was at its lowest point in the brief period between the
end of the Vietnam War in 1974 and end of detente 3 or 4 years
later Then it began to climb as more resources went lor nuclear
arms in general and space research in particular. Table XI shows
245
first how the U.S. reacted to the launching of Sputnik I with a
sevenfold increase in the amount devoted to space research in a
period of 4 years. Quite clearly the relaxation of tension during
detente enabled the Americans to soft peddle on space research
and to focus their minds on Vietnam and the Middle East. During
the Yom Kippur War in 1973 the USA sent considerable supplies
of arms to Israel and assumed a continuing high level presence in
that area. The change in emphasis came during President Carter's
period of office but with little publicity. The table shows the
phenomenal increase in space research and development after
Ronald Reagan was elected as President.
TABLE X
ARMS EXPENDITURE IN THE USA AS A PERCENTAGF
OFTHE GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT, 1963-1983' 5
0)
Year
(2)
Arms expenditure as
Percentage of GNP
(3)
Percentage
changes in col (2)
(4)
Encumbent 1 *
President
1963
8.86
John F Kennedy
1964
8.1
-86
Lyndon Johnson 17
1968
9.3
+ 14.8
Lyndon Johnson
1972
6.6
-29.0
Richard Nixon
1976
5.3
-19.7
Gerald Ford 18
1980
5.5
+ 3.8
Jimmy Carter
1984
6.9 1 *
+ 25.5
Ronald Reagan
The military-industrial complex, whose interests are served bv
the increases in defence expenditure, has been exercising greater
influence over Presidential and, therefore, government, decision-
making. It has set the hidden agendas of post-war US govern-
ments, establishing their priorities so that issues affecting the
welfare of the people, such as jobs, education, health-care
facilities and social security have been pushed to the bottom of
the list. Its influence, moreover, has not been exercised through
secret breakfast meetings with the President, though these
undoubtedly have had some significance, but through the manner
m which defence expenditure has become pivotal in the economies
of local communities throughout the USA, often determining
their economic survival.
246
TABLE XI
SPACE EXPENDITURE BY THE US GOVERNMENT,
1963-1984 20
/ 1 ^
(1)
(4)
Total Soace
Expenditure
Percentage
Encumbent 2 '
Year
(Millions of dollars)
changes in col (2)
President
1959
784.7
Dwight Eisenhower
1963
5434.5
+592.6
John F Kennedy
1964
6831.4
+ 25.7
Lyndon Johnson
1968
6528.9
-4.4
Lyndon Johnson
1972
4574.7
-29.9
Richard Nixon
1976
5319.9
+16.3
Gerald Ford
1980
8688.8
+63.3
Jimmy Carter
1984
17477.3
+ 101.1
Ronald Reagan
Each President is served by a network of advisory bodies.
When he has a problem or when he wants clarification of an issue,
perhaps even when he wants information, there is always a study
group or departmental committee ready to serve him. The advice
he gets, say on the choice of weapons systems, may be important
for the fortunes of particular manufacturers but it is not vital for
the military-industrial complex as a whole. In general it is a ritual
which gives an acceptable image to the process of private profit-
making.
When the Reagan administration was formed early in 1981 it
gave no indication of its policy on space issues. In August.
President Reagan directed the National Security Council to
review space policy. As he had no knowledge of such matters and
was inexperienced in foreign affairs this seemed a sensible step to
take. The NSC set up an inter-agency working group consisting of
representatives of the Departments of State, Defense and
Commerce, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Chiefs of Staff
of the Armed Forces and of a number of government agencies
like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA). The military was well represented but not the private
armaments manufacturers.
The advice given to Reagan, as to his predecessors, came from
the professionals in government departments and economic
247
agencies. The different Presidential encumbents varied in the
ways m which they sought this advice, bv overplaying or
underplaying the role of the National Security Council in relation
to the Departments of State and Defence, by preferring informal
meetings, as did Kennedy, or secret cabals, as did Nixon, often
including only himself and Henry Kissinger. Whichever method
was used there was competition between the players, private and
public arguments about alternative courses of action; there were
doves and hawks often negating each other but essentiallv playing
the same game, as with Casper Weinberger the inveterate hawk
and George Shultz the uncertain dove in the Reagan administra-
tion.
It was a year before Reagan received advice from the space
review study group but long before then the parameters of
government policy had been pronounced by Casper Weinberger
the new Secretary of Defense, when, in October 1981, he said
that the USA would "continue to pursue an operational antisatel-
litc system" in pursuit of the government's declared policy of
being able to fight and prevail in a nuclear war. 22 In a step which
gave a practical twist to Weinberger's statement, and in the same
month as he made his speech, the government awarded contracts
worth $418.8 million to the giant armaments firm, Vought and
Boeing, to continue with research into an antisatellite system.
This put the space review into perspective. It was to provide
operational details for an already articulated policy.
SDI Contracts
The Strategic Defense Initiative provides a similar example
President Reagan made his "Star Wars" speech on 23rd March
1983 which purported to initiate research into a major ballistic
missile defence system. It was described as a speech from the
top • Apparently even the Secretary of State, George Schultz
and the Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, knew of it
only in its final states. But which top? The effect was to accelerate
the transfer of US resources to defence expenditure and, within
that, to gam space research priority over other defence items
From 1980 until 1984 the expenditure on space activities more
than doubled. During 1983 and 1984 it rose from $12,440.7
million to $17,477.3 million an increase of 40.48 per cent There
were many beneficiaries. On the day of the summit meeting on
1 9th November 1985 between President Reagan and Mr. Mikhail
248
Gorbachev The New York Times published the following two
tables:
TABLE XII
'STAR WAR' CONTRACTS AND CONTRACTORS 24
The largest prime contractors ranked by total 1985 Strategic
Defense Initiative Awards. Listed in millions of dollars, excluding
government agencies.
f
COMPANY
CONTRACTS
AWARDED
PRIMARY RESEARCH AREA
Boeing
Airborne infra red sensor
TR vv
M 3
Mir ad ground based laser;
Alpha space based laser
Hughes Aircraft
OU. 1
Airborne sensors.
kinetic energy weapons
M.LT.'s Lincoln Labs.
59.7
Processing sensor data
Ay co
53.4
Laser research,
optical tracking
Lockheed
45.7
Laser research.
kinetic energy weapons
Rockwell
42.0
Gallium arsenide
semi-conductors, space
surveillance and tracking
Teledyne Brown Eng.
40.1
Systems engineering
LTV Aerospace
25.1
Radar interceptors.
homing devices
Aerojet-General
22.6
Sensor experiments.
space boosters
The above tables show only the most lucrative contracts. At
that time the top ten SDI contractors commanded more than oO
per cent of the contract money. The firms most preferred by the
government were those which were well established in the
nuclear missile business and which had built Minuteman Missiles,
MX missiles and military satellites. The Pentagon had already
spent more than $2 billion on space defence research spread over
more than 1.500 contractors. Indeed in October 1985, the
249
TABLE XIII
'STAR WAR CONTRACTS AND CONTRACTORS 2 '
Total awards to date to prime contractors for all projects in
millions ol dollars.
C U MP A IN Y
1 1 —
TOTAL AWARDED TO DATE
TRW
$323.9
Boeing
217.4
Lockheed
192.0
Teledyne Brown
180.0
Rockwell
165.7
Hughes Aircraft
155.7
LTV Aerospace
98.6
McDonnel Douglas
75.9
Avco Corporation
72.7
BDM International
62.4
government had published a 28 page list of SDT related contracts,
many of which had gone to small enterprises. The amount of
money spent on space research was minisculc bv Defense
Department standards but the programme's potential was not,
for the estimates for a fully deployed system varied between $400
billion and $1 .5 trillion. The firms were still in the paper phase of
research and the real profits were due when they engaged in
technology demonstrations of specific hardware systems from
laser weapons to advanced radar systems. Nonetheless an
industry had already risen around SDI during the previous 18
months in California's aerospace and electronic industries centre.
President Reagan's televised speech mapped out his goal. It
was to "embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet
missile threat with measures that are defensive" but he was vague
about the scope of the protection to be provided and the means to
achieve it. Was he, for example, contemplating a single system?
Would it provide a complete population defence? Was it, in any
event, feasible? Two days after the speech Reagan signed
National Security Decision Directive 85, entitled "Eliminating
the Threat from Ballistic Missiles" which directed the bureacracy
to conduct "an intensive effort to define a long-term research and
development programme aimed at an ultimate goal of eliminating
the threat posed by nuclear ballistic missiles". To facilitate this
250
effort he ordered a study to be undertaken "to assess the roles
that ballistic missile defence would play in future security strategy
£ the United States and our allies". 2 * Casper Weinberger
established study groups which were organized on the basis ol
subgroups to carry out these instructions. The first group reported
bv October with 'eight volumes of evidence giving a generally
optimistic assessment of the long-term feasibility of achieving a
ballistic missile defence system. A second report, out at the same
time was also enthusiastic. The reports were passed through the
bureaucratic process which led to the President. They were
combined and processed until they formed a simple set ot
recommendations confirming the practicability of the President s
original aim. , . .
The SDI contractors had good reason to be pleased with this
intellectual exercise. Their future profits were assured, unless o
course the USA and the Soviet Union reached an agreement
which would cause the USA to abandon SDL They were afraid
lest the Soviet Union introduced new compelling peace initia-
tives When Mr Gorbachev announced the Soviet Unions
comprehensive plan for the abolition of all nuclear weapons by
the year 2000 they were appalled. According to the Washington
Port thev even viewed as ominous the Soviet proposal for a quick
50 per cent reduction in the number of weapons It reported that
"many U.S. contractors fear that weapons they have researched
and developed for years will become objects of superpower
bargaining before entering the lucrative stage ot tuQ
production". 27 This spectre arose when the summit meeting took
place between President Reagan and Mr Gorbachev in November,
1985 The contractors were apprehensive lest Sov!et concessions
persuaded Congress to try to pare the programme down. They
were unsure about committing their own capital to a programme
which could be scuttled at any time. It was clear that he
conventional defence budget would be relatively stable in the
near future so, The New York Times reported, "every company is
on notice that, if they want to be a long-term player, they can t let
S.D.I. get away". 28
Arms and the Community
In reality the US contractors had little cause to worry. Already,
on 31 March 1984, President Reagan had assured them that no
arrangements or arguments beyond those already governing
251
military activities in outer space have been found to date that are
judged to be in the overall interest of the United States and its
allies".- They were part of the fastest growing industry in the
USA, Their share value had increased almost 40-fold since the
1970s. They were in a no-risks business. The state guaranteed the
credits, the outlets and profits. Whatever the amount of the bill it
was always met by the tax payers. But the greatest guarantee of
profitable survival was the manner in which defence contracts had
permeated the whole of American society. In previous periods of
military mobilization the American public was hostile to those
who profited from war. Those days have long since gone. Since
the first years of the Reagan administration hostility "has given
way to the notion that defense industrv profit is as American as
new china for the First Lady". 30 Everyone wanted to share in it.
Ihe research workers from the Highlander Research and
Education Centre in Tennessee, USA, who investigated the
impact of military production in eight states in the upper south in
the 1980s commented that "The Pentagon's state-by-state print-
outs of prime contracts helped us understand that defense dollars
permeate nearly every town or county in the region rather than a
few centres of weapons production and that much of that money
does not go for the tanks, guns and planes we imagined it did. A
little bit of research revealed that the Defense Department's
version of a public works program exerts an enormous influence
over our region's economy - through all its well publicized ways
and by propping up countless marginal institutions and enterprises
from small town sheriff departments to doughnut makers to strip
miners. We learned that despite all the money and influence, and
despite the national mythology, the South . . . actually doesn't
differ from the rest of the country in the extent of its dependence
upon and its politicians' hankering for military contracts". 31
The SDI is an issue concerning jobs as well as military strategy
The New York Times reported that "some in Congress argue that
strategic defense, like nuclear missile and aircraft contruction
programmes, will create a host of highly skilled and unskilled
jobs This is borne out by the way in which state
governments "have elevated military construction and payroll to
the most coveted form of federal aid. Defense industries arc
becoming the coin of the economic development realm . . ," 33
North Carolina holds, "Procurement conferences" to "offer a
time-honoured opportunity for contractors and military installa-
tions to advertise themselves to prospective suppliers - and for
252
lonaress people to help their corporate constituents do business
w th the government" ^ Tennessee's Economic and Community
Development Office was prepared in 1982 to take anything trom
consoles for tracking systems to radar systems, laser homing
devices air-delivered clusters of mines and 155mm launching
tubes for guns. What it did get in Huntsvillc, due to the lobbying
of influential Howard Baker when he was Senator, was a contract
to produce ghoulish body bags, a symbol of the Vietnam War in
preparation for the nuclear holocaust, making it one of the
highest per capita recipients of defence contracts in Southern
USA 35 The contract office of Robins AFB, a large industrial
complex in Georgia, boasted that 1,229 firms had signed up for
sub-contracting work there during 1981 * All eight states in he
Highlander study tried to interest small businesses in the
advantages of sub-contracting with the prime defence contractors
manv with illustrious names such as Hercules Inc which
produced agent orange during the Vietnam War; J. P. Stevens,
manufacturers of army uniforms and a notorious anti-union turn ,
Dupont, the original American armaments manufacturer, and
Union Carbide, infamous for the Bhopal tragedy in India but also
the sole private contractor in the manufacture of the first atom
bomb by the Manhattan Project and the private corporation
synonymous with the nuclear complex at Oak Ridge Tenessec
from where US nuclear weapons production is controlled. Oak
Ridge produces parts for every major nuclear weapons system.
The intricate system of subcontracting linked the prosperity ot
a multiplicity of local communities to the concerns ot the
multinational arms manufacturers. The survival of the prune
contractors depended upon the US pursuit of world military
supenoritv and so, therefore, did that of the local communities It
was not simply Union Carbide, General Dynamics or IBM which
considered the possibility of detente as ominous. Pentagon
dollars shored up sweat-shops in the South's textile industry and
small-time suppliers of everything needed to maintain he
expansion of a military production system A reduction in the
Defence Budget would ripple ruin through American society like
a wave. This is the meaning of the militarization ot American
society It does not necessarily entail jackbooted black or brown
shirts 'poundine in local town squares. It comes about through a
national economic dependency on war The authors of the
Highlander study gave their version of militarization when they
stated:
253
"We think that the U.S. military production system
is ... a maddeningly unimaginative, not to mention
dangerous, way to offer public works jobs and conduct
centralized economic planning through the back door
Making body bags in Scott County, Tennessee, may
help shore up corporate power or establish consensus
among the nation's haves, but it has very little to do
with militarily defending places, people or ideas
"The hall-mark of the military production system, at
least in our region, is choicelessness. In communities' all
around the South, military production is one of the few
- if not the only - games in town. Various social
programmes and civilian industries may create more
jobs than capital-intensive airframe assembly . . . but
the actual choice many people face is: work in a plant
making military boots or military beans or don't work
at all. Their families and neighbours feci the ripples of
that choicelessness. Multiply all those folks by their
counterparts around the U.S. and you have a profoundly
dependent economic constituency. Unless it has the
freedom to change, chances for any arms race changing
are slight." 37 6 fe
As so many industrial workers know, sub-contracting can
involve a repressive authoritarian relationship. British trade
unions have consistently fought against it in the 'lives of their
members, in coal mining, iron and steel and building in
particular. It creates a state of dependence and stifles dissent
People become grateful for small mercies and refrain from
complaining about low pay and oppressive conditions. This is
characteristic of all sub-contracting relationships. Small businesses
and local communities become equally subservient to the wishes
ot the contractors as do individual work-people. In order to
maintain their precarious stakes they support and protect the
system which oppresses them. When given a free election they
vote for it. They endorse its ideology believing that it acts in their
own interests. At no point are the intentions of the prime
contractors questioned for they are embodied in that same
ideology. In this way a consensus is achieved.
Long and Short War Scenarios
In the USA the consensus is about accepting the legitimacy of
254
arms production, even though this exposes them to the possibility
of genocide and only in the most macabre way serves the interests
of the dominant contractors. It is another of those intriguing
contradictions in American society. Those people who are tied up
in the militarization of American society and are, therefore,
dependant upon the extension of America imperialism, are
essentially isolationist in their political practice. They want to be
left alone but their ability to do this is dependant upon the
destruction of the lives of others, in societies and cultures they
seemingly care little about.
The questions to be asked about these contradictions do not
concern individuals but are about the structural conditions which
give rise to them and the ideology which re-inforces them. The
same applies to those contradictions which envelope the execu-
tives of the major American corporations and multinational
companies. In a society where private capital dominates these
executives have the greatest power. Their primary concern is to
maintain the hegemony of private capital. They maraud the world
in pursuit of this concern. Herein lies the genesis of their anti-
Sovietism. They can never accept a social organization in w r hich
private capital is non-existent and which, through its successes,
shows that private capital is both dispensiblc and a transient
phenomenon. Yet their very acts to protect private capital lead to
its possible destruction.
The Highlander Report relates an incident which occurred two
days after Ronald Reagan was elected as President in 1980 but
which had been planned by President Carter and his National
Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzczinski, two years before. It
illustrates the contradiction of private capital and it reads like a
sick game:
"Two days after Ronald Reagan swamped Jimmy
Carter in the 1980 presidential election, Washington
went to war. Between November 6-26, the military and
Carter's civilian agencies conducted the biggest
government-wide mobilization exercise since World
War II, battening down various governmental hatches
and pretending that the balloon was about to go up in
western Europe.
"Called Operation Proud Spirit, that exercise was
part of an effort kicked off nearly two years earlier by
National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. In the
255
Spring of 1979, before Iran and before Afghanistan,
Brzezinski directed 21 government agencies to review
their mobilization plans, an effort that culminated in
Carter s 1980 Presidential Directive 57 - a broad blue
print for mobilizing the military, the civilian population
and American industry. Proud Spirit itself emerged as
something less than a smashing success. While bureau-
crats hunkered in imaginary fox holes, the Pentagon's
m?x r l^? MlIitary Command Control System
(WMCCS), said to be the world's largest and 'most
expensive computer system, "fell flat on its ass"
according to one Pentagon plaver for twelve crucial
hours, the system failed to sift and relay reports on unit
readiness and transportation and to issue deployment
orders. J
"But there was more going on during Proud Spirit than
electronic failures and electoral post mortems. Between
November 12 and 19, a few dozen men gathered at the
Pentagon and the National Defense University at Fort
McNair. Called together by Army Chief of Staff
Edward C. Meyer, the men represented some of the
weightiest corporations in military contracting- RCA
ITT, Raytheon, Boeing, Hughes, General Dynamics'
Honeywell, Martin Marietta, and seventeen others
Military-industrial get-togethers happen every day in
Washington but the men who attended this meeting
were not the high-powered lobbyists who represent the
defense primes in the capital. Instead they were the
companies' chief executive officers (CEO). And not all
ot them represented corporations with obvious or long-
standing ties to the military. General Foods, Caterpillar
the Associated General Contractors, and Republic
Steel mixed with DoD's leading beneficiaries.
"General Meyer's Partners in Prepondence were in
Washington to talk about the guts of the Carter-
Brzezinski initiative -industrial mobilization. Earlier in
the year, Business Week had published a landmark
article "Why the U.S. Can't Rearm Fast", alleging
breakdowns and bottlenecks throughout the nation's
mihtary production system. Within weeks after the
CEOs concluded their business at Proud Spirit the
House Arms Service Committee and DoD's Defense
256
Science Board released reports echoing and embel-
lishing Business Week's cry of alarm. The reports
painted a picture of a dangerously deteriorating de-
fense industrial base abandoned by contractors, frus-
trated by long lead times and capacity shortages,
saddled by regulatory red tape and inconsistent buying
patterns, perilously over-reliant on foreign sources or
hard goods and nonfuel minerals and facing a critical
shortage of skilled engineers, technicians and blue-
collar workers.
"Meyer's invitees were presented a stunningly solici-
tous list of Army questions about fixing their alleged
problems. "What kind of financial or legislative incen-
tives are required to motivate indirectly to invest in new
facilities and to generally expand the industrial
base 9 i Given the eventual shortage of technically
skilled workers to what extent should defense producers
change over to equipment-intensive, computer-driven
plants? . . . Should the federal government be respon-
sible for construction to expand facilities to satisfy
mobilization needs, to fund it, and to perform the
engineering and construction."
The question which followed inevitably from these questions
was 'what kind of war arc we mobilizing for?' Is it for a short war
or a lone war? For a short war scenario mobilization would be
irrelevant because it could come too late. On this point the
Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
explained that "Modern weapons make the first battle the last
The manufacturing base that was critical to the U.S. m the past
wars will be of little use to us in future conflicts that are likely to
be short, violent and dominated by advanced technology, lhere
simply won't be any time to mobilize an entire nation and its
manufacturing base." This vision dominated US military thinking
until the end of the 1970s and, therefore, determined the nature
and extent of their industrial demands. It came in part from a
belief that the Soviet Union, even during the period of detente,
would embark on a nuclear attack without warning thus
provoking an almost instantaneous nuclear war; and in part from
the US's actual involvement in wars since 1945. The Vietnam War
was defined as a 'short' war, as were the Arab-Israeli conflicts.
Whilst this view prevailed the role of industry was largely
257
confined to the supply and maintenance of weapons of war This
of course, was highly profitable for the small e^S'Jr S
ReaffL ffii , eventually demolished during President
Highlander Report commented that -The Pentagon's 1Q7<k
re|layof Worid Warfl /I ^'"^V covered, including a
t^ttggtf? *« anylndustria, t^lo^
■Mgwrcar
ine irencl and brmeine lobs hark- tri ti, , t tc • '&
economic senseT^ga ^Zl^^ 8 °° d
The Responsibility of the President
Where does the President stand in relation to the milh^rv
industrial complex? If Eisenhower thought n 1961 tha t \r^
unwarranted mfluence" what is Reagan's postt.onf tthonj
258
i „ w k the New York Times' columnist, for instance believes that
Sence has grown bevond Eisenhower's worst nightmares
W ha kind of accomplice is Reagan then in bnngmg about the
Sarisation of American society? Does he lead or is he led?
ffl Tbe President signs the Directives which inmate or confirm
nolicies He stipulates the formulas with which the study groups
live to grapple His is the main public voice uttering polices on
hehalf of the government. It was Prestdent Reagan who camp-
rimed on the need to rebuild US mihtary power and who
eolated mi itarv power with national pride and mternational
sum Whenever he has had the opportunity he has glorified ^the
act ons of American armed forces in the Lebanon in invading
Grenada and in bombing Libya. He has provided the ideological
Kaonings for the militarization of American society. His signature .
Sd authorized the transfer of federal funds from social to military
uses Without his active involvement and full commitment the
procesTcould not take place. What kind of responsibility does
fttSE To ^estion that the actions of the President serve the
interests of the military-industrial complex but he is not then
Servant in the sense that he takes orders from them. On he
ontra v in personal relations both the military chiefs and the
t" of industry are solicitous of him acknowledging his
superior status. There is, in fact, no need for him or them to
famine the nature of their relationship. They
ideology. It is inconceivable to imagine an Amer can President
being elected through the existing system who did not toll the
virtues of individualism, of private profit and the accumulation of
caput They pursue the same aims. The President as a poll ,ca
teader has to mediate between competing interest groups but his
primary aim must coincide with that of the dominant economic
group in the society, otherwise the system would lack cohesion
and become destabilized. Even during the New Deal pence o
President Frankin D Roosevelt when he introduced legislation to
encourage trade unionism and assist the poor the _ prime
intention was to protect the institutions of capitalism
The existing political processes in the USA do not allow for major
dissent against capitalism. , „ f ,i,„ 1
The main question to be asked about the President of the LSA
is not whether he is the master or servant of this or that particular
group but what is the nature of the system of which his position is
In integral part for it is that which confers a behaviour pattern on
259
him irrespective of his political party. There has been no
S'vief IX ' 9 ? h Wh ° haS „ nW bee " -^communist and an, -
Soviet, who has not been vitally concerned with securing militarv
superiority for the USA, who has been unwilling to overthrow bv
rteWthe°mrH if " eCeSSary thOSC sta <" within the hlmt
sphere of the US and sometimes without, who have challenged its
hegemony. It has not mattered that during that perld trim
SSSSft from the Demoeratie Party and four {Z
deHvedlromT^^f — " nd ^ ° f relations
derived from the antagonistic class relationship between the
owners and non-owners of property. Exploiters are pitted against
the exploited and rival exploiter are pitted against each othe
and J °P erates f with a nithta, disregard of personahtfes
2hi» , COm , paSS, ° n , f ° r pe °P' C ' This characteristic is presen
within a single capitalist country and in its relations with oE
On an international level there is a hierarchy of naiions
SSi^ £Xpl ° itCd - ™ * — m-akes u'Te
thfZrt ° f " ati0nS ' haV£ " ecd for armed forc « both to protect
hcmselves and to encroach on others. The countrv at the top o
extend its influence. Thus militarism and imperialism arc two
ides of the same coin. Precisely how militaristic a country needs
to be, however, depends on circumstances. Imperialism does no,
necessarily involve a high level of militarist^ PositionsTn the
fa tT ct ^ ide0l ° 8y aS WC " 35 Th «= British
L;7.t -ru Ce ,",' < Ury . were '"iperialisi without being overtlv
t:ssr he ycars ,eading up to *• ^
US^ TheTjsT f °| r ' h r gr ° Wth ° f miHtarism in P^sent-day
' ? e , USA - as he le ^ng capitalist nation since 1945 is in a
IT! H ° rlCal POSiti ° n - U is -i° stled "V Germany and japan fo
the leading position but although this in the pas, has led to wars°t
h ex "Z c ot n a a h r threa, ) inSeCUrity ° f * he USA
woHd whlh 1 86 a 1 d lncreasl "g semen t of socialism in the
world which is the antithesis of capitalism. Its position as the
Thfs hi™ 0n X threatC ' led because the ^ is threatened
Th, s has never happened before. In the inter-war years the Soviet
Union existed but it was no, feared. The Americans vtoims o
their own propaganda, believed that the new Soviet state was
perpetually on the verge of disintegration and ^u d f eked
260
,nnle like a pack of cards. The resilience of the Soviet people ,n
^Second World War. the economic achievements of its system
th ; d S the tremendous victories of the Red Army shattered those
Slusions The spread of socialism has prevented the pieces being
f, t ogether The American defeat in Vietnam confirmed the
vulnerability of capitalism and the potential of socialism.
So t is the socialist challenge to private property r.ghts which
the real threat to the USA and all the Presidential talk about
Soviet aggressiveness is a smokescreen to cover this fact. The
fbrea therefore, is global. It is not one, moreover which can be
££ economic and ideological methods which had failed ,n the
ferwar years when socialism was a fragile thing. The crude u e
of mHitarv power is the only option left. This was made clea
when President Truman announced his Doctrine of Contmnment
on 12 March 1947. 4 - "No pronouncement D J Heming
commented, "could have been more sweeping. Wherever a
CoZnunist rebellion developed the United States would suppress
it Wherever the Soviet Union attempted to push outward, a, any
pomt around its vast circumference, the United States would
resist The United States would become the world s anti-
Communist. anti-Russian policeman".- Thus was created the
need for a huge sprawling, marauding military machine .
The decision to start this process rather than to seek accommoda-
,ion with the Soviet Union was a Presidential one but he . made t
as the custodian of the private enterprise system reflecting the
needs of that svstem. Once it was made then the Pentagon began
priming the pump of military production which quickly developed
F,s own dynamism, grew under its own momentum and made its
own demanXon the political leaders. The role of Presidents and
lesser political leaders thereafter has been to facilitate ite
ttansfc? of the nation's resources to the custody of arm
manufacturers and to legitimize ,t as a pa riot.c act. Th s al the
Presidents have done though with varying degrees of public
^ftThTus'president has masters then the apparent culprits ate
the leading executives of the largest conglomerates of private
cfpi al involved in arms production, namely the multinanona
company. The military chiefs undoubtedly
pressure group but they are formally subordinate to the Prwjdent
and owe their appointments to him The executive s o the
multinational companies, on the other hand, are largely autono-
my and have vitS economic power bases. They control budgets
261
greater than those of many stales. On their own they can
?™i a < m £ ,8° vernmem , s and toPPle political leaders. It is not
imposstble to concc.ve that the US President could be a casualty
rnnn!l r h easoi \ on the basis O' appearances in this case 'we
conclude by condemning multinational companies. That was the
nfL ft T E 'f n t h °wcr proceeded. If he had remained in
office after his valedictory address presumably he would hayc
proposed constraints on the core elements 'of the militarv-
2. fZ the n^ leX c UC V S a COdc of conduct similar t0 '"^ drawn
up by the UN or a Senate investigation with much publicity about
chicanery over arms contracts. No such actions would, of course
have resolved the problem which, as I have already pointed om
"° less tha " the militarization of American society
Appearances as all social analysts should know, can be
misleading. Multinational companies are the latest expressions of
increns, T , r f ° f the de ^ of "»»opoly to
increase Their behaviour is not unethical according to the values
in sim,' h '^r ? * *™ ,hat of ^ monopolie
ir similar circumstances. It is difficult to distinguish between the
Union Carbide and General Dynamics in contemporary USA
The mutationals, hke their minnions, respond to their situations'
They could not do otherwise and survive. Those situations are set
the beZ o ° :P T ^ HC,to «- 'f a President wants to al.e
nflnen , , ? f , ^mtiaml companies and destroy the
influence of the military-industrial complex there is only one
one'The'diffi^nft '"I ' ha J m ° de and re P ,acc i( with a socialist
Z l J h y ' S ' h f at he 1S as much a P"PP et in the system as
Z r? a ™V nanufa : ture ^ a servant of the hidden hands of
Uto^tSZ?™ '° ma " imiZe Pr ' Vate PTOfit f0r ,hoSe
seems" ft". °\ this „ cha P ter take " b V pessimistic for it
seems that the only effective constraint on the multinational
beneficiaries of nuclear arms production is the abolition of the
but Mm of ■ thT* nS * ft ' f m mul,inationaIs *>d Presidents are
but parts of the jigsaw which make up international society The
desire of the Soviet Union for peace, the peace initiatives of the
FurorS ,he CampaignS ° f Peace Movements in
Europe together generate a world opinion in favour of peace
m r e us'whn'f so ^ cann . ot ignore and which reinforce those
in the US who favour the elimination of nuclear weapons It is
clear, however, that the problem which American arms production
262
creates for the world can only be resolved within and by American
S ° C Arms production has become the engineer of the US economy^
To displace it would cause severe dislocation. On the other hand
fee possible consequences of continuing with it could be the
Innihnation of the society which feeds from it. It ,s this choice
S will force a solution involving the elimination of nuclear
weapons The electorate of American society is a vital part ot the
SC. The choice it faces must compel it to silence the advisers
and cut off the funds on which nuclear arms production depends
When there is no profit in arms production the multinationals will
be forced to do other less damaging things.
FOOTNOTES
I The Presidents of the USA since 1 948 have been:
1948 - Harry S Truman
19S2 - Dwishl D H.iscnhower
1960 - John F Kennedy (succeeded by Lyndon Johnson on his assassina-
tion in 1963 until 1964)
1964- Lyndon Johnson t^^t-j,,
1968 - Richard Nixon (succeeded by Gerald Ford on his impeachment in
1974 until 1976)
1976 - Jimmy Carter
1980- Ronald Reagan
1984- Ronald Reagan
2. The Presidency of Dwight D Eisenhower by Elmo Richardson. 1979, p. 1 92.
3 the New York times-, 18. January l%\ . . ,
i The President and the Executive Branch by Robert R . Bowjein The
Making of Americas Soviet Policy, edited by Joseph S. Nye. Jr., f: 69-
5. Elmo Richardson, op. cit., pp. 74-75 , +n , c ripn r ( , an H
6. Stated by James KillLan, Special Assistant to the President f
Technology; quoted by Paul B Stares in Space Weapons and U.S. Strategy.
Origins and Development, p. 39.
7. The New York Times, 18 January 1961
8. Stares, op. cit. , p. 58.
I ^fX'^st. «■ Mills was the Professor of Sociology at
Columbia University.
1 1 . Reported in full in The New York Times 1 8 January 1961
12. Monopoly Capital by Paul A Baran and Paul M ^ ez ^^^^
13 Our Own Worst Enemy by Highlander Research and Educat on Centre
Tennessee. USA. 1983. p. 229. This book is a valuable, highly detailed
account of the militarization of the US economy.
I Sotce: «SIv^ *™ '-*•' P-*"^ 1 «
by the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
263
16. This column indicates The President who was in office at the time of the
election and, therefore, concerned with the arms expenditure for the
previous 4 years.
17. Lyndon Johnson became President for one year on the assassination of
John F Kennedy in 1 963, before being elected in his own right.
18. Gerald Ford assumed office on the impeachment of Richard Nixon in
August 1974, He was therefore President for only 2 years and bore little
responsibility for their events.
19. This figure has been obtained from the 1985 Year Book of the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute.
20. Source: Space Weapons and U.S. Strategy, Origins and Development bv
Paul B Stares, p. 255.
23. Explanations concerning Presidents are as in the previous table, except
that the 1959 figures, the year before the Presidential election, are
intended to show the level of space expenditure before the full effect of the
launching of Sputnik I was felt, compared with 1963 when it was in full
swing.
22. Stares, op. cit., p. 217.
23. ibid, p. 225
24. New York Times, 19 November 1985,
25. Source: Federation of American Scientists (New York Times, 19 November
1985).
26. Paul B Stares, op. cit. , pp. 225-229
27. The Washington Post, 1 9 November 1 985 .
28. The New York Times, 19 November 1 985.
29. Quoted by Paul B Stares, op. cit. . p. 216.
30. Our Own Worst Enemy, op. cit., p. 6.
31. ibid, p. 6.
32. The New York Times, 19 November 1985.
33. Our Own Worst Enemy, op cit, p. 12.
34. ibid, p. 13.
35. ibid, p. 55.
36. ibid, pp. 13-14.
37. ibid, p. 191.
38. ibid, pp. 1-2.
39. ibid, pp. 3-4.
40. Lexington Herald - Leader, Lexington , Kentucky 23 November 1985.
41. See Monopoly Capital by Paul A Baran and Paul M Sweezy 1968.
Penguin Edition, chapter 7, for a further and penetrating analysis of this
question.
42. See The Origins of the Cold War by Martin McCauley. 1983, pp. 65-69.
43. The Cold War and its Origins by D F Fleming 1 960, volume 1 , p. 446.
264
PART IV
nti-Sovietism in Practice
Chapter Twelve
Trade Unions And Anti-Sovietism
The Contradictions
The aenera) effect of the continual projection of the Soviet
The general ei f Western democratic values is to
Union as the evdarmtnes is • 1 . political endorse-
oonvince electors m. cap ™ u "tnes to This „
ffl ent to the Z could sustain such
^CCriW^Sme credibility with ordinary
Union as a contamination . that t hev
problem with anti-Sovietism. t is an integral ^part ot t neuv
r:,;:,r £s^"-k£s£ ass *
267
are the antithesis of the individualism of capitalism. Unions are
based on solidarity; in their unadulterated form they practise
democracy and they aim for various types of equality These
values arise out of the day-to-day experiences of wage and salary
earners. A logical consequence of the preference for collectivism
between workers in their own organizations is an extension of it
to the wider society involving a belief in socialism entailing public
ownership of the means of production, the use of centralized
planning mechanisms to distribute resources and government
provided health services, education and social services
This has been recognized by many British trade unions, some
ot which have written socialist objectives into their constitutions
tor example, paragraph 3(s) in the rule book of the National
Union of Mineworkers states that it is an object of the union "to
join in with other organizations for the purpose of and with the
view to complete abolition of Capitalism." The Amalgamated
Union of Building Trade Workers which has now amalgamated
with other building trade unions to form UCCAT, aimed for "the
establishment of the Co-operative Commonwealth the world
over." An aim of the United Society of Boilermakers, which was
established in 1834, was "the extension of co-operative production
to assist in altering the competitive system of industry for a co-
operative system of ownership and control by the workers
The Transport and General Workers' Union sets out to extend
-co-operative production and distribution" There are many
similar examples. These aims have consistently been represented
m policies about nationalization, centralized planning and govern-
ment services. The Trades Union Congress has regularly advocated
socialist policies over the last 70 years, even though it has
practised social engineering m its day-to-day activities. There is
no doubt that the socialist transformation of Britain is an issue for
British trade unions. It impinges on the question of anti-
bovietism in two ways.
First it is in the interest of the private owners of the means of
production to frustrate the socialist objectives of unions and to
prevent those unions which have not reached that stage from
doing so. The ideological means of doing this involves praising
capitalism and denigrating socialism. In domestic politics this is
done by linking nationalization with bureaucracy and government
planning with subsidies and the profligate spending of 'taxpayers'
money'. Government interference is correlated with inefficiency
and wastefulness. Conservative governments have had considerable
268
ita imnrinting these correlations on the minds of British
sU ccess !n imprinting ^ ^ ^ of sociahsm are
el nfinS tfdiLu"sions about the introduction of a state organized
«kt measures introduced in Britain since 1945 but hey would
more discussion in me crn Revolution than
Astern destgS °f Soviet Union became the hncnp.n m
measure of their political consciousness
ThP RHtish trade un on movement s view ot tne oomci uu
isIomS ca ed b v the issue of communism as .opposed to so ta,
SSSSSSaSSfaatf
269
expressed through a disdain of intellectuals and a preference for
practical, down-to-earth matters. Indeed it reflects the false
division between theory and practice which characterizes British
social science.
The consequences have been important in British political life.
In the first place the pragmatic, empirical approach of trade
unions determined the nature of the Labour Party and set the
tone for political discussions in the Labour Movement as a whole.
The Labour Party took its terms of reference about political
theory from the unions which formed it. Theory was never
important; it did not bind or divide or differentiate between
political positions as it did in many Continental countries where
political parties preceded the growth of trade unions. Where
political action against the capitalist system was initially by
political groups rather than unions it was usually formulated by
intellectuals concerned about the finesse of analysis, with a
tendency to argue with each other and to split into factions. The
Social Democratic Labour Party in Czarist Russia had these
characteristics from its formation and implanted them on the
trade unions they formed. The German Social Democratic party
was a Marxist party before the First World War which was deeply
concerned about theoretical heresies. It was over Marxist
revisionism in that Party that the major debate between Karl
Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Eduard Bernstein occurred
in the 1890s. Whenever political parties within the Labour
Movement have come before trade unions then ideological
divisions have split the unions into rival, competitive groups with
contrary views of socialism and dogmatic positions in relation to
the Soviet Union. Thus in Germany during the Weimar Republic
there were national trade union centres representing Marxists,
Christians and employer-supported organizations; in France since
1949 there have been central bodies representing communists,
socialist anti-communist and Christian unions.
The British trade union attitude which scorned, even trivialized,
theory, meant that dogma was never so important as to divide the
movement. Alone amongst the major trade union movements of
the world, the Trades Union Congress has remained unchallenged
since its formation in 1868. Because, however, it regarded theory
as irrelevant it tolerated different political perspectives. Trade
unionists who were communists were not generally disqualified
from participating; indeed many were elected to offices at all
levels of the union hierarchies. Unions frequently publicly
270
h vet still tolerated communists in
aopted anti-communist P 0 ^*^^ pron ounced support for
^councils, in the ^^^Sc& enjoying positive
t Soviet policies through the l ^ * J ambivalence
Sfons with individual ^^S^i^ W
was reflected in the attitudes of l ^^\ n ^ com mun\st when
^ Citrine, for example, was *£^^^ 19 26 until 1946,yet
£ was the general ^^^to leader . pressed to
Thelmpactof the Bolshevik Revo^on
The attitude of British trade umons ^ October
went through distinct P^/^ e °? 1926, British unions
Revolution until ^"^Ru^. They w^m*d the
endorsed and supported Bctow* :* intervention to topple
October Revolution and im The Parliamentary
fee Bolshevik 9^^ X ^^L withdrawal of British
Committee of the ™C demanc m
troops from Russia ^h^yeW. Then, on If May,
It repeated t ^
1920, London dockers ^nslated woto g they suspectc d
,oad the Joiiy G ^ e ^?^a Sthe Bolsheviks. A Special
it of carrying munitions to i^aga^ ned t0 cali a strike
Trades Union Congress in July . ^ ion of arms against the
unless the g^^^toSfaS. with the Executive
Bolsheviks. The TUC then jorne Parliame ntary Labour
Committee of the Labour Party ^nd ft a k
Party and in an h.stonca > unique act [t Many local
and formed a Council Auion ^ were
initiatives were * ake V^n
formed to mobilize workers n Conference in London
The Council of Action called a Nation** opponents of
^August. 1920, *«S^,T^ Ap**»
direct action, such as J H Thomas rf Ac(ion call
support for a resolution autho nang ^ which „.
"for any and every form of ™™ a . [its ) policy . . . [and] «
stances may require to give efl l and dip iomacy and to
order to sweep away secret W"mg ^ be jn accQrd
assure that the foretgn pohcyo ™L» for an end to war and
with the well-known d»« f the pcop ^ ^ ^
the interminable threats of war
271
occasion was the war between Poland and Bolshevik Russia.
When the British threatened to intervene it was to prevent the
Bolsheviks from occupying Warsaw but from August 1920 the
Polish army under French leadership repelled the Red Army,
making intervention unnecessary. The British government was
able to project its innocence.
The Council of Action's campaign tapped the underlying
sympathy which British workers had for their Russian counter-
parts in their attempt to establish a Workers 1 State. That feeling
was never entirely eroded by anti-Soviet propaganda. There has
always been a sufficient recognition of the importance of class
amongst British trade unionists for them to identify in some way
with a working class which had acquired state power, no matter
what mistakes it was alleged they were making. This recognition
was enhanced by the sacrifices of the Soviet people and the
victories of the Red Army during the Second World War and it
continued to be a factor which unions had to contend with even at
the height of the Cold War. There was never a total capitulation
to anti-Soviet propaganda with the consequence that British
unions played an exceptional role through to 1949 in maintaining
relations with Soviet trade unions.
Three trade union delegations went from Britain to Soviet
Russia between 1917 and 1926. The first in 1920 was a joint TUC
and Labour Party delegation led by Ben Turner, the leader of the
Textile Workers' Union, and included the dockers' leader Ben
Tillett, and Margaret Bondfield from the National Union of
General Workers. It went on a fact-finding mission and returned
to accuse the British press of perverting the facts about Russia.
They had seen no one dying of starvation in the streets, no
interference with religious observation, no evidence that the
Commissars were living in luxury and, they added, neither
women nor children had been nationalized. Turner was con-
vinced that the Bolshevik government was supported by the mass
of the people. 2
The tenor of the second delegation's Report in 1924 was similar
to that of 1920. It made two important points. First, it stated that
"there can be no peace and progress in European civilization until
the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics is admitted on a basis of
general agreement to a free and friendly footing in the community
of peoples . . This opinion was sadly confirmed in the late
1930s when the ostracism of the Soviet Union by the West
stopped the formation of an anti-Nazi alliance effective enough to
272
nrevent war. Secondly, the delegation this time was wholly
organized by the TUC and led by A A Purcell of the I«urmshing
Trades Union and a consistent advocate of close relations
between Britain and Soviet Russia, who recognized the conse-
quences for the Labour Movement of anti-Sovietism. Its Report
stated that "misrepresentations as to the results of the Russian
Revolution have been used as a "red herring" to divert and
distract the British people from the pursuit of reforms and
reconstructions essential to their own peace and prosperity.
This too, was sadlv confirmed by subsequent experiences
parucularlv when in the Cold War period the TUC itself engaged
in anti-Soviet propaganda. These premonitions, including most ot
the Report itself were condemned by the press, except for the
Daily Herald. The third delegation went in the autumn ot 192^
simply to discuss establishing formal relationships between the
TUC and the Soviet AUCCTU. _ ,
Both Fred Bramley. the general secretary of the TUC trom
1923 till 1926 5 , and A A Purcell favoured the establishment ot a
formal Anglo-Soviet Committee and while m Moscow they had
discussions with the leaders of the Ail-Russian Central Council of
Trade Unions on that question. The international trade union
movement was divided into two conflicting organizations. Western,
but mainlv European, trade union centres were represented by
the International Federation of Trade Union which had been
founded in 1901 but reconstituted in 1919. A Soviet initiated Red
International of Labour Unions held its inaugural conference m
July 1921 Britain was represented on its Provisional Committee
by J T Murphy, the convenor of the Sheffield Shop Stewards
Committee. From then there was bitter wrangling between the
two organizations with the British TUC attempting to act as a
broker. The disagreements were deeply ideological but the
argument was over the technicalities of affiliation. The IFTU was
prepared to consider applications for membership from RTU1
affiliates in accordance with its own statutes whereas the All-
Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, for its part, wanted a
preliminary conference without pre-conditions to examine the
possibilitv of forming a united world organization. The British
TUC though affiliated to the IFTU favoured the Soviet proposal.
The TUC was defeated at the IFTU General Council in
February 1925 and thereafter formal communications between
the two centres ceased until after the Soviet Union was admitted
to membership of the League of Nations in September 1934. lne
273
TUC again made a proposal to admit the AUCCTU to
membership of the IFTU in 1935 and in 1939 but the majority of
the European trade union centres rejected the idea. Walter
Citrine reported that if the TUC had pressed the matter the IFTU
would have split. The TUC had communicated with the affiliates
of the IFTU prior to the VHIth IFTU Congress in July 1939,
stating that
"it is absolutely essential that Russia should join with the
democratic Powers in resisting Nazi and Fascist aggression. Our
General Council feel it encumbent upon them to do their utmost
with a view to inducing other National Centres to recognize this
point of view, and to get them to realize that, just as it is
important that Russia should stand with the democratic Powers
for the preservation of peace, so it is equally essential that the
Russian Trade Unions should take their place in the IFTU and
thus strengthen the solidarity of the International Trade Union
Movement."
"It is far from the intention of the TUC General Council to do
anything which might tend to widen any divisions that now exist,
but they think that present circumstances fully justify them in
approaching, in the most fraternal spirit, the other National
Centres which have hitherto opposed the Russian affiliation. We
earnestly appeal to them to re-examine the matter and consider
whether they can change their views, so that when the British
Resolution comes up for discussion at. the Congress, their
delegates will have been instructed to give it their support." 6
The resolution was defeated. Only France, Mexico and
Norway supported the British position. The majority insisted, as
it had done in 1925, that Soviet trade unions had to accept the
statutes of the IFTU to qualify for affiliation. The objections to
meeting the Soviet trade unions were not overcome until the Red
Army began its memorable series of victories against the Nazis.
In 1943 the Trades Union Congress took the initiative again and
decided to convene a world trade union conference in London in
1944 along lines agreed by the Soviet AUCCTU. It issued
invitations to 71 trade union organizations in 31 countries. The
Conference was eventually held in February, 1945 and, for the
first time, drew together unions from all areas of the world
irrespective of their ideological positions. The only major trade
union centre which refused to participate was the American
Federation of Labour. The outcome of the Conference was the
formation of the World Federation of Trade Unions.
274
The Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee
The Labour government in 1924 gave diplomatic recognition to
the Soviet Union. The Russian delegation which came to Britian
to negotiate the terms of the treaty contained four prominent
trade unionists, including Mikhail Tomsky, the chairman of the
AUCCTU, who met with members of the TUC General Council
for the first time in a formal session. They discussed trade union
unity. Tomsky was invited to the Trades Union Congress in
September 1924 where he raised the issue. Hardly had the invitation
been sent than the AUCCTU requested the TUC to send a
delegation to the Soviet Union "in order to establish permanent
regular connections between the two Movements". This was the
delegation which reported extensively on labour conditions early in
1925 but it also discussed the creation of an Anglo-Russian
Committee with Tomsky. Then in April 1925, an Anglo-Russian
Trade Union Conference was held in London, organized by the
FUC, at which an Anglo-Russian Committee was formed. Fred
Bramley, the TUC secretary who had been consistently in favour of
unity, proposed an annex to the Conference declaration which
suggested exchanging documents of mutual interest and memor-
anda on special topics; developing the closest possible mutual aid;
establishing an Anglo-Russian joint advisory council comprising a
chairman, secretary and three additional representatives from each
organization. The declaration, plus its annex were endorsed by the
TUC in September 1925 and the new Committee held its first
meeting shortly afterwards. Fred Bramley was at this stage critically
ill and W M Citrine became the Committee's secretary. Citrine,
with George Hicks, the general secretary of the Amalgamated
Union of Building Trade Workers, went to the Soviet Union in the
autumn to discuss the future activities of the Committee. 7
The Committee, however, had no future. It became a casualty
of the 1926 General Strike like so much else in industrial relations
in Britain, though not before it was castigated in Britain and
abroad. The only foreign trade union centre to regard it as a
positive step towards world trade union unity was the Norwegian
Arbeidernes Faglige Landsorganisasjon. They wanted to join it.
The Germans denounced it, as did the TFTU. The American
Federation of Labour regarded the Committee as an "attempt to
destroy from ambush the freedom of workers in democratic
countries." The AFL, however, did not even affiliate to the IFITU
until 1937 after which it led the opposition to unity with the Soviet
275
trade unions. The British Labour Party was critical of the TUC's
step and, to emphasize its point, started a serious campaign
against domestic communists at its Annual Conference in 1925.
The incipient anti-Sovietism of the British media began to mature
with such a prize target as the Anglo-Russian Committee.
It is possible that the Committee would not have survived the
ideological attacks on it even if the General Strike had not
occurred. The General Council of the TUC had significantly
changed its composition between 1924 and 1926. Two influential
right-wing leaders J H Thomas and Margaret Bondfield had
returned after serving in the short-lived Labour government. It
had new members, including Ernest Bevin, the powerful leader
of the Transport and General Workers' Union. Walter Citrine
had taken over the secretaryship of the Council from Bramley.
This General Council had different priorities compared with the
1924 one. Anglo-Soviet relations which had been important for
Bramley were displaced from the TUC agenda by acute domestic
issues in the pre and post General Strike situation. But more
importantly the perspectives of the TUC about the Soviet Union
had begun to change. Bolshevism to the mid-twenties generation
of union leaders was not about a glorious workers' Revolution
but a communist state which was here to stay, which had inspired
the creation of communist parties bent on revolution in numerous
countries and had attracted the most militant of their members to
challenge official union orthodoxy and stimulate class confronta-
tional politics on an international level through the Third
Communist International (Comintern) and the Red International
of Labour Unions. It was quite easy to view the established Soviet
State in the international conspiracy terms conjured by the mass
media. The actions of the Soviet trade unions during the General
Strike tended to confirm that view in the councils of the TUC.
The pattern of anti-Sovietism which was consolidated after 1949
began to take shape.
The Soviet AUCCTU offered material assistance to the TUC
General Council as soon as the General Strike was called. It
suggested that every Soviet trade unionist should contribute one
quarter of one day's wages to support the strikers. The total
amounted to about 2 million rubles of which 250,000 rubles were
sent immediately. The General Council refused the money,
however, and returned the cheque to Moscow. The AUCCTU
responded by turning the money over to the Miners' Federation
of Great Britain during the nine months' lock-out after the
276
General Strike had been terminated. The MFGB had appealed
for international support and rece.ved almost £1,250 OCX) from
Soviet trade unionists, amounting to over two-thirds of all funds
collected and more than 90 per cent of the receipts from , outs.de
Britain 8 There is no doubt that this money enabled the MFGB to
survive the lock-out. In the view of Herbert Smith the President
of the MFGB the Russian workers understood the meaning or
solidarity. 9 The money was sent without conditions but m the
hope that relations between Soviet and British miners would be
strengthened and formalized. ,
When the General Strike was called off some Soviet leaders
reacted by criticizing the TUC General Council and proffering
rtriw to the unions affiliated to it. Zii.ov.cv the secretary of
Comfnten,, accused the General Council of being a "stinking
corpse" while Tomsky complained that it had iso ated.the Brush
workers from the international proletariat. All of this according
to Citrine, was gross interference in the affairs of British unions m
olation of the" first principle agreed to by the Anglo-Ru^an
Committee. Citrine wrote that "The Russians could not keep
theh bargain . . . They definitely interfered in the Strike of 1926,
abu i.,g the General Council of the TUC and appealing to he
members of Trade Unions over their heads . . . Because of this
die Committee was dissolved." 1 " Only two meetings of the
Committee were held after the Strike, in
and in Berlin on 23 August in the same year. M^M-to**
refused a visa to enter Britain so he was unable to address the
1977 Trades Union Congress in Bournemouth where the HA.
made the final break with the Anglo-Russian Committee There
were no further formal contacts between the British TUC and the
Soviet AUCCTU until after the Germans had invaded the Soviet
Union in 1941.
The Campaign Against Communists
The vear 1927 marked the visible beginning of a different phase
in the attitude of British trade unions towards the Soviet Union
which, with varying degrees of intensity and an interruption
during the Second World War, has continued till today, It is one
in which the policy of the TUC is determined less by class identity
and solidarity and more by political expediency, lhc lut
became increasingly concerned about its own survival as an
institution. Under Walter Citrine's direction it sought status and
277
political acceptability and this involved taking rough edges off
protest and pursuing only the realizable. For example, during the
1930s, it ceased trying to reduce unemployment and concentrated
on administering it to lessen its impact. It wanted consultations
with governments and counted its success in this respect in terms
of the number of government committees TUC nominees
attended. The TUC directory of committees listed only one
government committee on which the General Council was
represented in 1933 but twelve in 1938-39. 11 A small but
indicative sign of the change was the willingness of union leaders
to accept State honours. Six trade union leaders had received
knighthoods prior to 1935 but mainly for their political work. In
1935 both the general secretary of the TUC and a prominent
member of the General Council received knighthoods from a
conservative government. The Times, reporting on the 1935
Birthday Honours List, stated that "As for our national affairs,
the great part played in them by the Trade Unions is recognized
by the fact that two members at the next meeting of the TUC will
be Sir Arthur Pugh and Sir Walter Citrine. 1,1 2 This was a mere
nine years since the TUC was denounced as an agent of
international communism.
The TUC turned in on itself in its endeavour to gain
respectability; its focus was communist trade unionists. The
General Council had ended the General Strike without a k no
victimization' clause. In consequence large numbers of militant
trade unionists were dismissed and blacklisted by employers
without union protection. Then the TUC began its own campaign.
In 1928 Walter Citrine published a 29 page booklet called
Democracy or Disruption which examined the influence of
communists in unions. From 1923 communists put pressure on
unions through their own involvement but also through the
National Minority Movement, an organization with individual
membership which aimed to form factory committees, to lessen
inter-union rivalry and strengthen local' Trades Councils. The
members of the National Minority Movement, however, were
vulnerable to trade union discipline for it was a body which lay
outside unions and could be proscribed by them. This weakness
was lessened from 1932 by the formation of the Rank-and-File
Movement which was based on the affiliation of union branches
and shop stewards 1 committees and which had no individual
membership. Rank-and-File Movements were established in
different industries and regions where they organized militant
278
action. For example, the London Busman's Rank-and-Fi e
Movement was organized in 1932 and had a considerable
nfluence in the Coronation Strike of London Busmen m 1937^
Working alongside these unofficial movements was the National
Unemployed Workers' Movement, formed in 1921 and led by the
influential communist Wal Hannington. After the General Strike
these organizations became the prime targets of TUC hostility.
The hish point of the TUC's anti-communist campaign was the
publication in October 1934 of Circulars 16 and 17, subsequently
described as the Black Circulars, advising unions about the
influence of communists and instructing trades councils not to
allow communists to be delegates. Circular 17 to Unions, signed
bv Citrine, stated: "I have to ask that your Executive Committee
will give consideration to the possibility of drawing up regulations
or amending the rules of your organization so as to empower
them to reject the nominations of members ot disruptive bodies
for any official position within your organization . . . u rcu'ar
16 to " trades councils, more strongly worded, contained the
General Council ruling "that any Trades Council which admits
delegates who are associated with Communist or Fascist organ-
izations, or their ancillary bodies shall be removed from the list o
Trades Councils recognized by Congress . . . ' A new ^set ot
model rules was formulated for trades councils which embodied
the General Council decision. Both circulars received mixed
receptions. Of the 211 unions affiliated to the TUC m l 93a only
41 replied that thev were in general agreement with the policy.
There was a greater degree of consensus among trade councils tor
283 replied that thev accepted the policy of political proscription;
1 8 expressed their dissent and 80 did not reply at all.
The TUC policv had a limited effect in practice at local level tor
the period was marked by a growing militancy among workers as
unions recouped the membership losses incurred during the
depression in the early 1930s. Workers were politicized by he
intensified political campaign against fascism and by the impact of
the Spanish Civil War. The dilemma which unions faced was
characterized bv the Transport and General Workers Union
during the 1937*London bus strike. The strike was organized by
the Rank-and-File Movement which, despite the Black Circular,
claimed the affiliation of thirty-one out of fifty London busmen s
branches and the allegiance of all except one of the members ot
the Union's Central Area Bus Committee. The leaders ot the
strike were Bert Papworth and Bill Jones, both communists, each
279
of whom was expelled for his strike activities but re-admitted and
then promptly elected to the General Executive Council of the
Union. 16
This paradox of union members electing communists to official
union positions contrary to the anti-communist policies of their
unions was a common phenomenon even during the Cold War
period for it reflected the reality of industrial relations. At shop-
floor level it was the class antagonisms not ideological perspec-
tives which determined the behaviour of workers while the
further the analysis was from point of production pressures the
more ideology exercised influence. This paradox influenced the
behaviour of the TUC and had its counterpart in its approach to
international communism. The TUC supported the Western
stereotype of the Soviet Union yet was compelled by the
exigencies of practical political situations to seek unity with
Soviet trade unions. This was best illustrated by the formation of
the Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee in 1941 .
The Creation of World Trade Union Unity
The indifference shown by the British government to the Soviet
Union during its attempts to create a united anti-fascist front
from the mid- 1930s, turned to hostility after the Soviet-German
Non-Aggression Pact was signed in August 1939 and Britain had
declared war on Germany on 3 September. There were some in
Britain who defined the Soviet Union as an ally of Germany but
others who regarded it, and not Nazi Germany, as the main
enemy. This hostility intensified after the Red Army occupied
Eastern Poland on 17 September, 1939 and engaged in war with
Finland during December. This was the period of the "phoney"
war between Britain, France and Germany so the media had little
to divert it from an anti-Soviet agitation. The situation created
havoc with allegiances in the Labour Movement. The British
Communist Party itself was divided over whether or not to
support the war with Germany in the light of the Soviet position.
The Soviet Union was accused of imperialism. There was talk of
waging war against it, which prompted Labour leaders to advise
caution. Mr Herbert Morrison, for instance, whilst wholeheartedly
condemning the Soviet Union, said on 4 December that "If
British reactionaries and Herr Hitler made any move towards a
Nazi-British alliance against Russia, Labour would oppose it." 17
The President of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, Will
280
1 awther. distanced his union from the more extreme denuncia-
tions being made. He said that "while we agree that this action
Lainst Finland) is wrong, the Mineworkers; Federation does no
ijociate itself with the general ant,-Sov.et or Fascist
declarations." 18 In a rather futile practical gesture Britain
activated the defunct League of Nations so that the Soviet Union
could be expelled from it on 14 December, 1939.
The trade unions participated in all this with varying degrees of
complicity. The Annual Congress of the TUC was not held m
September 1939 so there was not a collective v^o^^~
for the Trade Union Movement as a whole. The TUC Genera
Council had pressed the IFTU to consider the affiliation of Soviet
trade unions earlier in the year but it acquiesced when it was
turned down. The question could hardly have been raised a^way
while the Soviet pact with Germany was intact. When Walter
Citrine visited the Annual Convention of the American Federa-
tion of Labour in November 1940 he did not mention the Soviet
situation though he did talk with William Green the AF of L
P esident, about the sad plight of the IFTU which by then was a
gnSV, having lost Norway, Denmark, Holland Belgium and
France through the German occupation of Europe that year.
The invasion of the Soviet Union by German armies on Sunday
n June 1941 had an instantaneous impact m Britain. Mi
Churchill speaking on the day of the invasion, said: "No one Tias
been a more persistent opponent of Communism than I have
been for the last 25 years. I will unsay no word that 1 have spoken
about it. but all this fades away before the spectacle which is now
unfolding - We have offered to the Government of Soviet
Russia any technical or economic assistance which is ^ out P^e'
and which is likely to be of service to them . The Russian
danger is therefore our danger . . . just as the caus of any
Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause ot free men
and free peoples in every quarter of the globe . . On LZ July,
1941 as the Russian armies were retreating, ar i Ang o-Soviet
Agreement was signed in which both sides agreed, that during
this war they will neither negotiate nor conclude an armistice or
reatv of peace except by mutual agreement: Announcing he
Treaty, Mr Churchill said: "It is, of course, an alliance, and the
Russian people are now our allies"
Perceptions of the alliance were bound to be minced by the
years of constant anti-Soviet propaganda. Some ot those who hac
perpetuated the propaganda became victims ot it. W P and Zelda
281
Coates commented that "There was nothing to choose between
the views published in the press on June 23, and those expressed
privately in the corridors of the House of Commons when the
members reassembled on June 24. One member in conversation
with the authors summed up the judgement of the majority of his
colleagues thus: "The Red Army at most will last three months"".
It is perfectly true that there were men and women in Whitehall.
Fleet Street and in all parties in the House of Commons who had
accurate ideas of the prowess of the Soviet Forces, but they were
in a minority. The majority were blinded by prejudice, political
and social . . ." 2I
Military prowess, however, was not a criterion which concerned
the mass of trade unionists in Britain. The important fact was that
they and the Soviet Workers were fighting on the same side. The
reality of this exposed the fraudulent character of anti-Sovictism.
This point was made by a miners' delegate at the TUC in
September 1941 when he said: "The workers of Britain anxiously
want the closest association with the workers of Russia. The
workers of this country are beginning to see that all they have
read abut the wickedness of the Russian Government is not true.
They are beginning to see that they have been tricked, duped and
doped by unscrupulous liars inspired by class prejudice and class
interests . . All in all the immediate and widespread identity
of British workers with the Soviet people indicated how super-
ficially anti-Soviet propaganda had penetrated the consciousness
of many ordinary workers. No one at that time was inspired by
Red Army victories for there were none. There were only
retreats and defeats, devastation and killing. When Europe had
been over-run there had not been comparable expressions of
identity with the workers of France, Belgium, Denmark and
Holland; nor had there been one when the Germany Army
ploughed through Poland.
When the Annual Congress of the TUC met m September,
1941, in Edinburgh the position on all war fronts was critical. On
the second day the TUC debated an emergency motion, moved
by Citrine, which, amongst other things, stated:
'The Congress, mindful of the pledge given bv the Trade
Un ion and Labour Movement to support Soviet Russia in evcrv
possibly way, offers organized collaboration with the Russian
Trade Union Movement. Congress therefore cordially endorsed
the proposal of the General Council for the establishment of an
Anglo-Russian Trade Union Council, composed of an equal
282
number of representatives of the All-Union Central Council of
Trade Unions of the USSR and of the British TUC General
Council and providing for regular meetings alternatively m
Russia and Great Britain for the exchange of views and
information upon the problems with which the Trade Union
movement in each country is called upon to deal, and affording
opportunity for joint counsel and co-operation on matters of
common concern, on the definite understanding that there shall
be no interference on questions of internal policy and organization
which must remain the exclusive responsibility of each body "
In the subsequent debate the only criticisms of the motion were
that it should have been more forthright in welcoming co-opera-
tion with the Soviet Union and should have been less prescriptive
until the Soviet trade unions had made their views known. It was
acclaimed. The dav following the debate Stalin informed Churchill
of the desperate situation of the Red Army. Without a Second
Front this year, he stated, in the Balkans or France and without
substantial' supplies of arms and aluminium "the Soviet Union
will either be defeated or weakened to the extent that it will lose
for a long time the ability to help its Allies by active operations at
the front against Hitlcrism." 2 ^ Virtually the whole of European
Russia had fallen to the German army. Kiev was lost. 17 days
later: Odessa was evacuated on 1 October; the Germans were
approaching Stalingrad on the Volga River; an offensive on
Moscow was expected at any time. None of this tragic news was
received by British unions in a defeatist manner. All the divisions
in the Trade Union Movement had disappeared, as had the
doubts about the character of the war. British communists
became catalysts in raising the war effort in industry.
Within a month of the Congress, Citrine and a General Council
delegation of four travelled to Moscow. The AUCCTU had
suggested only one alteration in the TUC terms, namely that the
word Soviet should be used in the title instead of Russian, so
there was no delay in setting up the Committee. A formal
meeting between the two sides was held vn Moscow on 15
October at which an Eight Point Declaration was agreed, listing
the achievements and aims of the meeting. 24 The Committee
functioned effectively until February, 1945 when the first prc-
liminarv World Trade Union Conference was held. After the
USA entered the war in December, 1941 the TUC tried to
persuade the American Federation of Labour to join an All-
Allied Trade Union Committee but it would not, even then, sit
283
on a Committee with Russians; nor would it share American
representation with its rival central organization, the Congress of
Industrial Organizations, 25 The collaboration between the govern-
ments of the Allied Powers, involving meetings between Stalin
Roosevelt and Churchill, was never matched at trade union level '
Long before the end of the war, but after the Battle of
Stalingrad at the end of November, 1 942 when the balance of war
was finally tipped in favour of the Red Army, there were
discussions in Britain about world trade union unity. This was one
of many topics raised in connection with post-war structures. The
needs of the war had altered the focus of the dominant ideolotrv
from class antagonism, in which socialism and communism were
denigrated, to class collaboration, in which socialists and
communists were praised for fighting the Germans. British
workers, therefore, did not have to contend with a conflict of
ideas about their industrial experiences. Their feelings of oneness
with the Soviet workers were stimulated by communist shop
stewards, and, in the interest of enhancing the war effort
encouraged by media and politicans alike. In this unique
historical situation it seemed almost natural to talk about future
post-war collaboration between unions in all the allied countries.
Such talk led to a resolution at the 1943 Trades Union Congress
calling for a World Conference of representatives of the organized
workers of all countries as soon as war conditions permitted with
the intention of promoting the widest possible unity in the
international trade union movement. Following consultations
with a Soviet delegation at the Congress the General Council
invited representatives from 71 trade union organizations in 31
countries to a Conference in London on 5 June 1944. The date of
the Conference, however, was changed, because of the opening
of the Second Front in France, to 6-17 February 1945. The
outcome was the formation of an Administration Committee with
the task of drafting a constitution for a World Federation of
Trade Unions. The only dissenting voice was that of the
American Federation of Labour which refused to participate in
the preparatory committee and in the Conference itself. The
Congress of Industrial Organizations, however, was present and
represented American labour interests. A reconvened World
Trade Union Conference in October 1945 formally established
the World Federation of Trade Unions. Sir Walter Citrine was
e ected as President, with seven Vice-Presidents including Mr V
V Kuznetsov from the AUCCTU and Mr Sidney Hillman from
284
rtO The general secretary was Mr Louis Saillant from
the with two assistant secretaries, one from the Soviet Union
prance, with two assistant seer , th£
f! heTik ^vJ^n ^cS^ a single body embracing
9 °^m^^o l n^ and the Soviet Union. Its scope
Sded oS countries with 66'/, million organized workers.
Trade Unions and the Cold War
war in Europe ended on 8 May. me
Nations was signed at San Franco $ST<§£t
S tested its first a^c bomb w W cM- Angus, was
ffilnt Sov,e t P U n,on. The war
with Japan ended I on : £ Augu^ jcated weTe wo{bU1 .
newly recognized war d power s us. ft* as no
for the West to treat the « ^™ method thc West
£^?S"^5SS£- hy arms superiority.
Lend after 8 May, ^.d^^^pSt^cJrffciince.
2^%2££T2fcE& Plan. These were
285
accompanied by intense anti-communist campaigns throughout
the West. By 1949 the armoury of the 'Cold War* had been fully
displayed.
The British Trade Union Movement participated fully in the
processes hostile to communism and the Soviet Union. Its
activities had two related aspects. The first was that it identified
with the policies of the government concerning the Soviet Union.
The second one was it displayed its commitment to anti-
communism by purging itself of communist influences. Given the
development of the TUC since 1926 as a conformist institution
within the framework of capitalism it was unlikely that it would
analyze foreign allegiances in class rather than nationalistic
terms. Once the British government had taken its position in the
'Cold War', with the media in full support, the TUC had neither
the capacity nor the courage to step back and question the
wisdom of what was being done. An added complication, of
course, was that it was a Labour government which was pursuing
'Cold War' policies with a Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who
had been a leading member of the TUC General Council, taking
the initiatives. The primary foreign policy question after 1945 was
not why the TUC turned on its erstwhile trade union ally in the
Soviet Union so quickly and abruptly but why the Labour
Government sided with American imperialism against Britain's
most crucial ally in the war, as soon as it was sworn into office.
This was a major political turnabout, taken without discussion in
the Labour Movement or consultation with the electorate and
evidenced as early as the Potsdam Conference during which the
British General Election result was announced and the Labour
leaders Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin attended as replacement
members for Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden.
The attitude of the TUC after 1946 might, to a slight extent,
have been influenced by changes in its personnel. Sir Walter
Citrine left the general secretaryship of the TUC in 1946 and was
succeeded by an innocuous and uninspiring Vincent Tewson.
Citrine had always claimed that his dislike of British communists
had not influenced his view that Soviet trade unions should be
part of the international trade union movement and to some
extent the history of the 1930s bears that out. The leadership of
the General Council was taken over by Arthur Deakin, Bevin "s
successor as general secretary of the Transport and General
Workers' Union. Deakin unhesitatingly and enthusiastically
pursued Bevin's policies. But he and Tewson, unlike Citrine,
286
wete unable to differentiate between domestic and mternationa
communism. They turned against both the Soviet Union and
communists in Unions. Under Deakin's influence, the Transport
5 d General Workers' Union proscribed communists from taking
office in the union from 1949. The TUC under Tewson became an
Ltrument for proscribing pro-communist organizations. The
TUC General Council was dominated by a group of union leaders
who were anti-communist and fervently loyal to Labour
Government's foreign policies.
A prominent feature of the 'Cold War' was its totality and its
pervasiveness. It penetrated all aspects of life and all manner of
nstitutions. The government's foreign policy was no longer a
matter confined to the corridors of Whitehall and Parliament.
The change occurred because of the West's belief in the
international communist conspiracy theory. The Soviet Union
was perceived not simply as an enemy power but as one which
was at the centre of a world conspiracy to destroy Western values
and institutions. According to this theory the hand of Moscow
could be seen directing every communist shop steward. The 1 UC
itself made the point in a statement issued on 27 October 194b
when it stated that the General Council urged the executives of
all affiliated unions, their district and branch committees, their
responsible officer and loyal members "to counteract every
manifestation of Communist influences within their unions; and
to open the eyes of all workpeople to the dangerous subversive
activities which are being engineered in opposition to the
declared policy of the Trade Union Movement. In the considered
view of the General Council, energetic steps must be taken to
stop these evil machinations which threaten the economic
recovery of the country. Steady progress is being made in the
economic rehabilitation of this country and towards the restora-
tion of a stable economy in Europe. Attempts to wreck economic
recovery in the interests of a foreign power whose policy is to
keep the world divided, impoverished, and in constant dread of a
third world war, must be condemned and repudiated by all trade
unionists " 27 This statement was reprinted in a TUC document
about communism in 1955 which made the conspiracy point more
explicit The Communist Party, it stated, "is not a political party
in the normal sense. It must never get out of step with other
Communist parties of the world. If it does, it gets into trouble
with its masters in Moscow . . ," 28 The conspiracy network the
TUC alleged, operated in five main ways in that they nave
287
attacked trade union support for defence in the West, they have
plugged the phoney "Peace Campaign" all round the globe, they
have cultivated unofficial groups and invited them to Russia and
other satellite countries, they have tried to woo some unions with
offers of trips and they have pressed for the setting up of bogus
trade union unity committees." 29 It would be difficult to find a
more uncritical commitment to anti-Sovietism than that.
The ideological climate in the West after 1945 inevitably
influenced ordinary trade unionists towards anti-Sovietism even
though many of them had been impressed during the war by Red
Army victories. 'Cold War' policies began to be endorsed by
individual unions. Unions affiliated to the TUC began to be
differentiated according to their reactions to the TUC policy. For
the first time ideological divisions became pronounced in the
British trade union movement. Even the British miners who still
remembered the vital help Soviet miners gave them in 1926
veered towards anti-communism. Will Lawther, the President of
the National Union of Mineworkers from 1944 till 1954 belonged
to the cabel of right wing union leaders on the General Council
around Arthur Deakin. And when Arthur Homer, the communist
General Secretary of the NUM publicly supported a French
miners 1 strike in 1948 which was led by their communist oriented
union he was admonished by the NUM executive for speaking
'contrary to union policy'. 30
Most British trade unions endorsed the policy of anti-
communism though very few implemented it through their rules.
The National Union of Blastfurnacemen had practised political
discrimination since 1936. Indeed its rules read like a 1930s
recital of political agitation, stating: "Members or Supporters of
the Communist Party, the National Minority Movement, the
International Class War Prisoners" Aid Society, the National
Unemployed Workers' Committee Movement, or the Fascist
Party, or any allied or similar organizations, shall not be eligible
to hold any office or to represent the Union at any Congress or
Conference." The Transport and General Workers' Union, the
National Union of Operative Heating Engineers and the Clerical
and Administrative Workers' Union had rules forbidding
communists (and fascists, to give the rules credibility) from
holding office.
The practice of anti-communism, however, was most effective
at an informal level where communist trade unionists were
competing for posts and influence with non-communists. There
288
«,ere anti-communist influences quite apart from the media in
Inera Both Catholic Action and Moral Re- Armament organized
S endowed campaigns for their own
communists. A special journal for trade unionists called \ IR S News
spoTor"d by Jack Tanner, a former left-wing President of the
fZ gamated Engineering Union, was concerned entirely wrth
fnti-commumsm. Anti-communist pamphlets were published such
as Communist Solar System by IRIS, and The Penl ^Mst
by Woodrow Wyatt, to highlight the mtemational imphca .ons of
supporting communists at work. It was at the leve of work
however that the contradiction in the anti-commumst campaign
appeal Smmunists generally were active trade unionists; they
Effective local leadership and ^ST^^Co^
elected to local union posts. Even at the height of the Co d War
communist workers were elected to responsible union ^
branch level of the union hierarchies. They were most successful at
that level because media influences there were weakest Ant.-
o— ism was strongest in regional and nation^ umor , e ecnon
but it was never wholly effective. In the early 1950s , ther > were
communist full-time officials in the majority of areas of the NUM,
SSSe T&GWU before 1949, nine of the 34 members of its
Execu Council were communists and in some industries such as
me docks road passenger transport and engineering they were the
In L Midlands car industry — tsw,e
constantlv elected as convenors of shop stewards. This patchy
rSmel stoly intended to show that the ideological pressures
gta — "ism were frequently resisted.
workers tended to trust communists to represent them at woxk,
their view of the Soviet Union was softened. There was a
considerable gap between the media presentation of the Soviet
Union and the views of it held by ordinary workers.
The intensity of 'Cold War' pressures inevitably penetrated the
World Federation of Trade Unions The Executive Board was
weakened by the loss of two of the tnumverate which had formed
me WF^U Sir Walter Citrine resigned in 1946 and Sidney HiUman
delesate V V Kuznetsov, from the original group. Their successor*
had&
Each side began to be suspicious of the other. Whenever the
communist members made a proposal, ^J^^SZ
or attending a mass rally in Czechoslovakia, it was perceived as part
of f communist conspiracy. Similarly the Soviet representatives
289
believed that Arthur Deakin, who had succeeded Citrine as the
President of the WFTU, was acting in the interests of the Western
powers. 31 The Marshall Plan, announced in June 1947, became the
factor which intensified the growing divisions in the WFTU. James
Carey wanted to raise the issue at the Executive Board but the
Soviet representatives said it was a matter for a more representative
gathering. Whilst this procedural discussion was going on the
General Council of the TUC, claiming the matter had to be
discussed promptly convened a conference of trade union central
organizations in March, 1948 which approved of the Marshall Plan.
The genesis of a breakaway had been formed. Western union
leaders began denouncing the WFTU as a tool of Soviet propaganda.
Its publications were attacked for political bias. Sir Vincent
Tewson, Citrine's successor from the TUC, speaking for the
Western delegates, criticised the WFTU administration for
incompetence and wastage. The differences widened after the
British Trades Union Congress rejected a motion in 1948 which
stated that 'This Congress rc-affirms its support of the WFTU and
urges its representatives to resist attempts to destroy unity inside
this body ..." Deakin, for the General Council, spoke against the
motion and made public his criticisms of the WFTU. The final
break came on 19 January 1949 when Deakin and Carey, followed
by other members of the British, American and Dutch delegations
left a meeting of the Executive Bureau and resigned from then-
positions. The decision to secede was endorsed by the TUC in
September, 1949 by 6,250,000 votes to 1,017,000. In December,
1949, a new organization, the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions was formed in London. That act institutionalized the
division in world trade union unity. In effect, it resurrected the
International Federation of Trade Unions, which had been formally
dissolved on 14 December 1945, but with a more intense and bitter
anti-Sovietism.
The AFL-CIO
The attitude of American trade unions towards the Soviet Union
has always been less ambivalent than that of the British unions. The
American Federation of Labour has been consistently anti-Soviet
since 1917. The contradiction which has beset British unions,
whereby they have endeavoured to combine an underlying sym-
pathy with Soviet w r orkers with an institutional hostility to domestic
communists, has no presence in the USA. The American trade
290
unions displayed no admiration for the Bolshevik Revolution and
exeep t r the New Deal period, they have tried to purge
Wived of communist influences. When the ^tenwtional
Sato of Trade Unions was reconstituted in 1919 it offended
Z American Federation of Labour by opposing the Western
blockade of Bolshevik Russia and by support.ng the socialization of
fndustn The AFL refused to affiliate and practised the *olat_
vhich characterised the whole of American society. The first
S^crfA^rican trade unionists to visit the Soviet Union did
not Z until 1927 following which the contacts were largely
nltduXtic and desultory. The interest of^encan unions m
foreign affairs began to increase from the rmd-1930s as me
mStiona. concern about the rise of Fascjsm f ^.^f^
consequence the AFL affiliated to the IFTU m 1937 but it was
SmXtely confronted with the ---f^^^wS
thai the Soviet AUCCTU should affiliate to the 1FIU. Will am
Greer ^ the Pmsident of the AFL, reported with the comment hat
me TffiMon of the Soviet unions would create disunity an
perhS the destruction of the IFTU. He said that ^ JCo^mcil o
Tnde Unions of the Soviet Government of Russia docs not
^rtT^mocmtte trade union movement free from goveni-
merdlmation and control. In this respect, we cannot distmguish
"m dSence between the Central Council of Trade Unions of he
^Sernment of Russia and the Nazi and Ifegtt - coaled
labour front movement of Germany and Italy This view was
Untied even during the Second W>rid War. Indeed m m report
^TteAFl co-operated with the American government in its anti-
commums "s"are P campaign following the First World War and
ma~ed a consistent hostility towards domesttc communists
to legislate against commumst members as *e Un,ted ^inc
Workers of America did at its Convention in 1927. But tne>
exnSdYheir anti-communist sentiments mostly through internal
KSS against all kinds of d.ssenters. John L Lew* for
^ «d financial control of recalcitrant locals and
291
districts of the UMWA. This enabled him to suspend elected
officials and to appoint his own trustees or receivers to run them,
Increasingly in the inter-war years the districts of the UMWA came
under Lewis's control. Dissent was often suppressed by physical
means. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters made mem-
bership of the Communist Party illegal in 1935 but its main factional
struggles involved members of Trotskyist organisations. One of
Jimmy Hoffa's first organizing jobs was to wrest control of a
Teamsters' local in Minneapolis from members of the Socialist
Workers 1 Party. Hoffa said "I went there to Minneapolis . . . took
over the office, brought in a hundred crack guys, had the war. We
won every battle. And we finally took the union over and then
Farrell left and went with the Socialist Party"'. 13 Hoffa, who became
a notorious President of the Teamsters, was allegedly aided in his
'anti-Communist' campaign by "the Minneapolis Police Depart-
ment, the courts of the city, the country, and the state . . . the
mayor, the governor and an anti-labor law that had been . . . put
through by the Republican governor of the State . . .' ,34 That was
but one small illustration of the methods which became common in
the Teamsters 1 union.
The major progressive force in the American trade union
movement from 1935 was the Committee of Industrial Organiza-
tions which was formed as a breakaway from the AFL in 1935
with the purpose of organizing the mass production industries by
using the facilities provided by the National Labor Relations Act
of that year. The initiative for forming the CIO came from John
L Lewis; the President of the United Mine Workers' of America.
The UMWA largely financed the CIO. Lewis appointed the
organizers to lead the recruitment campaigns in the major
industries. Many of them came from the UMWA. He appointed
many communists who had been excluded from office in AFL
unions and some of whom he had discriminated against in his own
union, to spearhead the campaigns. The CIO started, therefore,
with a strong faction of progressive trade unionists. By the
outbreak of the Second World War there were, thus, two trade
union centres in the USA representing different politicial
perspectives. The AFL was the larger one but the CIO was more
dynamic and politically progressive.
The CIO represented the left wing of the American labour
movement. It was not, however, politically homogeneous. Some
CIO unions, the most prominent of which were the United
Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, the Inter-
292
national Union of Mine Mill and Smelting Workers and the
International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen s Union had
progressive leaderships. Others such as the United Automobi e
Workers were the scene of much faction fighting. Walter Reuther
had worked in a motor car plant in Gorki in the Soviet Union for
16 months in 1933 and 1934. He returned full of praise for the
Soviet system but by the outbreak of the Second World War he
had became a supporter of the Democratic Party. When he
contested the Presidency of the UAW in 1946, which he narrowly
won Reuther was then acknowledged leader of the anti-communist
faction in the union. He subsequently used the same organiz-
ational techniques as John L Lewis to suppress ^sent in the
UAW and he swung his union behind the government in the Cold
War period Other CIO leaders, such as Michael Quill, President
of the Transport Workers' Union of America, made dramatic
transitions to political conformity. There were some CIO leaders
who were anti-communist from the outset but until the end of the
war they were in a minority. The outcome of the bitter factional
struggles extended their influence and accounted, m part, tor the
switch in the approach of the CIO towards the Soviet Union after
^TheClO had supported moves to establish internationaltrade
union unity before the USA entered the war. When the Anglo-
Soviet Trade Union Committee was formed it urged the AFL and
other American unions to join it. Individual affiliates, such as the
National Maritime Union, sought to establish their own ties with
imilarly organized Soviet trade unions. The example set by the
CIO caused dissension among AFL Unions ^ New Yori k a
group of 150 officials in AFL unions formed a Committee to
Promote the Unity of the Trade Union Movements of the United
Nations. "Hundreds of local AFL unions, more than a dozen
State Federations and a number of international unions favoured
full cooperation by all sections of the American labor movement
with the Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee and AFL
membership in it." 36 Then when the AFL refused to take par tin
the discussions which led to the formation of the World
% J^ou oUr^ Unions in 1943 and 1944 the CIO enthustasU-
cally took its place. Shortly after the end of the war the CIO
suggested to the Soviet AUCCTU that they exchange delegat ons
and in consequence in July and August, 1945 a l Soviet ^ Trade
Union delegation visited major cities in the USA followed by an
American delegation to the Soviet Union in October. The -climax
293
in the relations between the CIO and the Soviet Trade Union
came when an American-Soviet Trade Union Committee was
established at the end of 1945. The CIO nominated five of its
most prestigious officials to sit on it. The warmth of feeling which
the CIO expressed towards the Soviet Union was revealed by the
report of the American delegation in October, 1945. Tt stated:
"We were horrified by the wholesale destruction wrought by the
Nazis; but we were filled with the greatest admiration for the
determination and united effort of the people, which has already
brought about substantial reconstruction and promise great
things for future elevation of living standards/' 37 Philip Murray
the President of the CIO, commented that the Report was
important for all those American workers who wanted to know
the truth about the Soviet trade unions. Then, as in Britain,
without any visible warning the truth gave way to the stereotype.
The view of the AFL all along was that any dealings with the
Soviet trade unions would give recognition to American commu-
nists and they intended to avoid that possibility. The CIO, with
an already significant communist influence, could not make that
correlation. Tt was reported that after the war the CTO had
eighteen affiliates which were allegedly run by communists. 38
There were influential communist factions in many other unions
so that the CTO's route to political conformity had to be different.
Once chosen, its task was to withdraw recognition from its
communist organizers and members.
The CIO gave way to the intense domestic pressures after the
war for a consensus in international affairs. Within 18 months of
the end of the war it joined some of its affiliates in the hunt for
communist trade unionists. The first step was a decision by its
Executive Board in November 1946 to authorize its President to
take over the funds and property of those sections of its
organization which refused to accept CIO policy. This was
followed fairly quickly by a denunciation of US communists for
interfering in the affairs of the CIO. The CIO, however,
maintained its foreign alliances until 1947 when it reiterated its
support for the WFTU. From then, however, it deserted radical
politics and placed itself firmly behind the Cold War policies of
the US government. It moved in support of the Truman Doctrine
of 12 March, 1947 which initiated overt US material support for
the right-wing forces in Greece and Turkey and wherever they
appeared. It endorsed the Marshall Plan in June of the same year
and then, in the 1948 Presidential Election campaign, backed the
294
Democratic Parly candidate, Harry S Truman rather than Henry
Wallace from the newly established Progressive Party who
favoured close, friendly relations with the Soviet Union. These
were the policy issues which became the subject of CIO
hegemony over its affiliates. They constituted a loyalty test for all
American unions.
At this stage the CTO became an adherent of the international
communist conspiracy theory and identified a stooge, a fellow-
traveller or an agent in every communist supporter. It used
various methods to uncover and expurgate them. The CIO lifted
its prohibition on membership raiding between affiliates. The
Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers' Union, for instance, was
raided by the United Automobile Workers. In April 1948, Walter
Reuther announced that the UAW would admit rank and file
members who wanted to escape from progressive unions.
Secessions were encouraged. For example, forty-two locals
representing about 26,000 workers with bargaining rights in
Connecticut left the International Union of Mine Mill and
Smelter Workers. 39 Factional struggles were intensified and
communist officials either recanted, as did Michael Qui 11, the
leader of the Transport Workers' of America, or were deposed,
as in the case of the officials of the Industrial Union of Marine
and Shipbuilding Workers' Association. The CIO then turned on
the unions which refused to compromise their positions in any
way. The United Electrical Workers, the largest of the progressive
unions, was expelled by the 1949 CIO Convention through a
resolution which accused it of betraying "the economic, political
and social welfare of the CIO, its affiliates and general member-
ship". The union was described in the debate as being "virtually
padded by and through the employment of many Communist
agents (who) ... are inbred with a feeling of hatred against
democratic institutions and democratic countries . . ." ,4 ° The
same Convention added a new section to the CIO Constitution
which stated: "No individual shall be eligible to serve either as an
officer or as a member of the Executive Board who is a member
of the Communist Party . , ." Walter Reuther had unsuccessfully
tried to persuade the CIO to discriminate against communists the
year before. In 1949, however, there was a national paranoia
about communist subversion and unions took up the hunt with
enthusiasm. Informing against communists was encouraged as
being in the national interest. The President of the American
Radio Association gave a lead and reported ten unions for having
295
communist officials. The CIO appointed a committee to hear the
charges and found them proved. Nine of the unions were
expelled. In the tenth union, the United Furniture Workers of
America, its policy was overturned during the course of the
proceedings after a campaign led by its President, Morris Pizer,
so no action was taken against it.
In most cases, the expelled unions, which represented govern-
ment workers, office employees, food and tobacco workers and
workers in fisheries and the farm equipment industry were
destroyed. In order to undermine the United Electrical Workers
the CIO established the International Union of Electrical, Radio
and Machine Workers under the leadership of James Carey, the
former member of the Executive Board of the WFTU. The
United Electrical Workers survived but in a truncated form. The
Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers also survived with a
loss of members. The International Longshoremen's and Ware-
housemens's Union under the leadership of Harry Bridges
maintained its membership and control of dock workers on the
US West coast after it was expelled but it was the only union to do
so. There was little need for the Congressional Committee on
Un-American Activities to be concerned about communist
subversion in unions for the unions themselves relentlessly
pursued communists,. By 1954, according to the US Bureau of
Labor Statistics, ''fifty-nine of a hundred unions had amended
their constitutions to bar Communists from holding office. Forty-
one of them discriminated not only against Party members but
also against advocates and supporters. Forty unions barred
Communists not only from office but also from membership. Nor
were such provisions mere window dressing; expulsions were
numerous and almost always upheld by the courts". 41 Because it
was often difficult to identify communists the unions acted against
dissenters in general. The classic role which unions have
performed in history of giving collective protection to unpopular,
dissenting causes ceased in the US. Instead unions began to use
systematic institutional means to curb dissent. In the United Mine
Workers of America, for instance, 19 of the 23 Districts had
officials appointed by the Union President by 1972 in order to
maintain political conformity. Every District which dared to defy
the President was placed in 'trusteeship'. Defiant officials lost
their jobs. But the consequence was more serious than that. The
general climate in the US was such that political non-conformity
everywhere was penalized. The few people who stood against the
296
erosion of civil rights were invariably penalised themselves. Few
workers were prepared to risk their jobs and livelihoods through
opposing the government's foreign policies or protesting about
the arrests and trials of communists for subversion. American
workers in general, as individuals and collectively, took the
lessons of the Cold War period to heart and retreated either into
orthodoxy or apathy 42 Thereafter, the government was able to
undertake virtually any foreign adventure without united protests
from organized labour.
The CIO leaders made it clear that their primary concern was
what thev described as the international communist conspiracy.
The communists they hunted were regarded as Soviet agents. 1 he
American trade union historian, Philip Taft, expressed in his own
work the reasoning which underlay this paranoia "The attacks on
Socialists and other dissidents"', he stated, -ended at the
conventions and were never in the entire history of the AFL
carried bevond that point. Nor was the loyalty of Socialists to the
labor movement ever questioned. The Communists . , pre-
sented a different issue. Following the dictates of an international
conspiratorial apparatus in the service of a foreign power, the
communists had been shown to be ready to sacrifice the interests
of their own members and the country and its people when it
suited the ends of the Soviet Union." 43 Somewhere m the
speeches of the union officials who spearheaded the anti-
communist campaign this point was invariably made. When
Philip Murrav, President of the CIO, attacked the leaders of the
United Electrical Workers, he spoke of their programme as an
echo of the Comintern" and added that their allegiances were
"pledged to a foreign government." 44 Walter Reuther described
members of the Communist Party as "colonial agents using the
trade-union movement as a base of operations for serving the
needs of the Soviet Union". 4 "' The unions had become the
purveyors of anti-Sovietism. . . c ■,- ,
The sign that the CIO had completed its transition from radical
politics was its merger with the ALF in 1955. From then it became
part of the most conservative advocate of consensus politics in the
Western hemisphere. The AFL-CIO operated outside the USA
in effect as a government agency and depended upon government
funds to finance its operations. The focus of those activities was
always anti-Sovietism. Frequent allegations were made that its
two main post-war directors of international affairs, Jay Lovestone
and Irving Brown, were CIA employees. In 1964 a House of
297
Representatives Banking Committee report revealed that several
US unions had taken CIA money, while former CIA agents
declared that they had worked for institutes in Third World
countries which were funded through the AFL-CIO, This last
allegation was the main theme of an article in Business Week on 4
November, 1985. In describing the link between the AFL-CIO
and the US government in the conduct of international affairs,
the article stated that: '"Through a group of little known
institutes, the AFL-CIO spends $43 million a year in 83 countries
- often for anti-communist projects that tend to merge with the
Administration's foreign policy themes''. The allegation focussed
on four operating units for the AFL-CIO International Affairs
Department located in different areas of the world. They were
the American Institute for Free Labor Development, operating
in 22 Latin American countries in opposition to indigenous
liberation movements, the African-American Labor Centre with
bases in 25 African countries, the Asian-American Free Labor
Institute which worked in 31 Asian and Middle East countries,
especially in the Philippines in an attempt to create an anti-
Marcos trade union movement which was acceptable to the
American government, and the Free Trade Union Institute which
channelled funds to unions in Europe. Ninety per cent of the 1985
AFL-CIO budget for these institutes came from US government
sources, namely the Agency for International Development, the
National Endowment for Democracy and the US Information
Agency. The combined cost of the four institutes was almost as
great as the total budget for all the AFL-CIO activities in the US,
With such an institutionalized financial tic-up between the AFL-
CIO and the US government it was virtually impossible for
unions to be used as platforms for attacks on government foreign
policies. This situation, however, began to show signs of change
in the early 1980s.
American unions are now experiencing contradictions which
are beginning to crack the 'Cold War' moulds into which most of
them were set so that the post-war consensus on US foreign
policy is being undermined. In recent years the membership
composition of US unions has been dramatically altered due to an
influx of women, blacks and hispanics. Coincident with this, the
old guard of the AFL-CIO leadership has been dying away to be
replaced by a much more politically heterogeneous and progressive
leadership. This change has been reflected in trade union action.
In 1983 the presidents of 22 AFL-CIO affiliated unions formed
298
the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and
Human Rights in El Salvador and Nicaragua. A number of
umons including the normally politically conservative United
Mine Workers of America, have united m opposition to the US
government's policy on South Africa and are campa.gn.ng against
StheTd Bv 1987 fifteen large unions had passed peace
?e P sorut1ons, seeking an arms accord with the Soviet Union Some
unfons now send delegations to the Soviet Union though the US
State Department consistently prevents them from receiving
frade unton delegations from the Soviet Union. These changes
epresen small lut significant steps towards rejecting ant.-
S as the primary aim of US trade union policy abroad. It
still remains the case, however, that, except for a brief period n
977-8 nc^ Soviet trade union delegation has been allowed mto
he USA since 1949. Moreover, both the AFL and the AFL-CIO
have never in their history had any formal contacts with the
W> AUCCTU The AFL-CIO has indeed been more extreme
iXtsue Than the ICFTU which it has consistently accused o
being too soft on communism. It was partly for this reason that
the AFL-CIO disaffiliated from the ICFTU in 1969.
Bilateral Trade Union Unity
The Western secession from the World Federation of Trade
Unions bS a number of important consequences tor trade union
uni y First, it removed the regular, automatic procedures which
bSSrirt union leaders together from capitalist and social st
Sries So long as the WFOJ existed as the single world
S body thenfrade unionists met from all over the world no
matter what the politicians and governments were doing an
"Xg about each P other. That facility was important because «
enabled some differences to be clarified and cleared up before
thev intended. After the split, communist and non-communis
mde unTon ts only met in an ad hoc fashion, following specia
nittt " were vulnerable to changes in the world
^ 1 climate and towering political 7^"^
without the institutional backing provided by the WF1U, were
^Ic^^he split was institutionalized by the formation
of th ^ntn^onal Confederation of Free
took on a form which was difficult to eliminate. Two mst.tutions
faced each otter which were motivated by desires for self-survival
299
as much, if not more, than the principle of trade union unity. The
ICFTU had functions which were created by the split; the
positions which its officials held were dependent upon its
perpetuation; the status which they acquired was derived from it.
There were vested institutional interests which flourished in anti-
communism and which, therefore, operated to develop, extend
and intensify it. Success for the ICFTU was measured, therefore,
in terms of the spread of anti-communist and anti-Soviet beliefs
and attitudes rather than in the spread of trade unionism
throughout the world.
This brought with it a third consequence, namely an intensifica-
tion of anti-Sovietism within and between trade unions. Member-
ship of the World Federation of Trade Unions had a moderating
effect upon the involvement of British unions in the early stages
of the 'Cold War. There was a measure of institutional loyalty
even when the practice of unity began to fracture. The split,
however, not only removed the constraints but acted as a catalyst
for competitive, hostile propaganda. A constant stream of
publications confirming and elaborating the conventional Western
stereotype of the Soviet Union flowed from the Brussels'
headquarters of the ICFTU to all the world's non-communist
trade union centres. Western countries were defined as democratic
while socialist ones were described as totalitarian. Westen trade
unions were 'free' while socialist ones were tools of the state or
appendages of the Communist Party. This distinction was
illustrated by the comments on the activities of the International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions in the TUC General
Council's Report for 1957. There, under the heading "Relations
of Free Trade Unions with Dictatorship Countries", it stated,
without explanation or supporting data, that 'The principles and
functions of free trade unions and those of communist organizations
are fundamentally different. Representatives of a free Trade
Union Movement can initiate and determine policy within their
own ranks, irrespective of Government or Party. Communist
unions, on the other hand, are merely agents or instruments of
their Government . . ," 47 Western trade union centres began
stipulating that they could not have relations with unions in
socialist countries unless they were "free", "independent" or
bona fide, meaning like themselves.
Immediately after the breach the World Federation of Trade
Unions attempted to overcome it by appealing directly to
individual unions in Britain. It continued to invite unions to
300
wtlnK . ind conferences. The TUC reacted by advising unions
vl no co^of kind with the WFO) or *s—|
Thk advice was given regularlv thereafter. At first the unions
Itpfcd ThT National Executive Committee of the National
Union of tvfineworkers, for instance, which had always been
Sve in its attitude to international unity, began to reject
1?FTU invita ion after 1949. Virtually all TUC affiliated unions
Sir* aX outset. But pressure was quickly generated to
h a the breach As early as 19*54 the Annua. Conference of he
NUM voted to establish "internationa trade uiwn Hrty aMfee
best means of protecting the interests
Then in 1956 it called for the re-establishment of the Ango
Soviet Trade Union Committee. These moves for umty w«h
Soviet trade unions, however, had Utile effect on the TUC for
more than a decade, for just when the relationship began to
teprove a crisis would occur which would cause it to regress^
"Te first major crisis was when Sov e. troops ™v«
Hunearv at the end of October in 1956. The TUC Uencrai
S reacted swiftly. It reported: "The Hunganan uprisin
wis at first successful. For a few days it seemed hat tnc
Hun anan cople might be able to shake <*»*Q»^
on them and to choose their own way of life- Ihtir boviei
overiords thought otherwise and moved ta£™££«*»«^*
ruthlcsslv the Hungarian Revolution." 48 The General Council set
ur a "Hdp for Hungarian Workers' Fund", distributed a million
co P ptes of a eaflct condemning the action of the Soviet govern-
ment protested to the Soviet Ambassador in London and then
on "6 November, -considered ways in which the British Trade
Union Movement could give further express^ to ;
n f tw* ..winn nf the Soviet Government in Hungary . n
Tided tha n:; was a ease for the cessation of all trade un on
exchTnee visits with the USSR" and circularized all affiliated
union" trades councils and trade council federations advising
th mo abandon plans to visit the USSR. A number o f«
ncludino the Transport and General Workers Union, the
Nationafl.^ion of General and Municipal Workers the Ama ga-
mated Union of Building Trade Workers and the Iron and Steel
Trades Confederation, cancelled their proposed trips.
Despite the events in 1956. however, bilateral arrangements
were continued between British and Soviet trade unions n
defiance of repeated TUC advice to the contrary and d p, c
intensive anti-Soviet propaganda. During the 19.17 Congress ot
301
the TUC which was dominated by anti-Soviet emotion, Dave
Bowman, from the National Union of Railwaymen, criticized the
General Council and stated that his union intended to send a
delegation to the Soviet Union in a couple of weeks. He added:
"In conversations with a number of delegates here I learn that a
number of trade unions have either accepted or are in the process
of considering invitations from the East European
countries . . .
Individual trade unions, though they participated m the
formulation of TUC policy, were affected only indirectly by the
split which produced the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions, for only trade union centres were affiliated to the
WFTU and the ICFTU. Their main international relationships
were conducted through the long-established International Trade
Secretariats which were autonomous bodies with jurisdiction in
specific industries. There were, for instance, ITS's for transport,
mining, printing and public employment. The Soviet trade unions
had never belonged to them. And they had never affiliated to the
International Federation of Trade Unions in the interwar years
because they had refused to sacrifice their autonomy. A condition
of the success of the WFTU in 1945 was that the Soviet trade
unions should join the International Trade Secretariats which
should then become Trade Departments of the WFTU. This
fusion was not achieved in the short life of the WFTU. 50
The British unions were in a dilemma. They were important
affiliates of the International Trade Secretariats both before the
split in world trade unity and afterwards and they played an
influential role in determining their policy. Yet they generally
resented the situation in which they could not establish contacts
with trade unions in socialist countries. The International Trade
Secretariats had close organizational and even closer ideological
links with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
They identified with its anti-communism. The British unions
resolved their dilemma by ignoring the existence of the ICFTU
and not allowing the commitment to the ITSs to hamper the
development of relationships with socialist trade unions. Within
five years of the formation of the ICFTU there was a regular
exchange of union delegations between Britain and the socialist
countries. This was especially the case in Scotland where the
Scottish Trades Union Congress, acting independently of its
counterpart over the border, encouraged a consistently sympathetic
approach to the socialist countries.
302
This patchwork unity with socialist trade unions inevitably
generated pressures for a more systematic, centralized and formal
unity. Once the 1956 crisis had receded in the collective memory
of the unions they began to resolve to mend the breach. The
question of world trade union unity was raised but not voted on at
the 1965 TUC but in 1967 the Congress of the TUC adopted a
resolution regretting the divisions in the world trade union
movement and urging the General Council "to explore all
possible means of achieving friendly contacts and consultations
with all bona fide trade union organizations with the minimum
objectives of hastening the social advance of workers in all
countries and preserving world peace." 51 The impact of this
resolution was destroyed because it was referred to the ICFTU
"Committee on Relations with Communist Controlled Trade
Union Organizations" and shelved. But before any union could
query the General Council's action another crisis broke out in
Czechoslovakia and the process of severing relationships with
socialist unions began all over again.
The General Council of the TUC met on 21 August 1968 and
issued a statement condemning the movement of troops from
Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia. It stated that "In the
light of this invasion the General Council have come to the
conclusion that it would no longer be useful to pursue current
contacts with the Trade Union Movement of the Soviet Union, or
with those of the countries associated in the attack. These
contacts were resumed in recent years in the expectation, now
shown to be completely unjustified, that the Soviet Government
was moving towards an altitude of greater independence for the
satellite countries, greater freedom for its own citizens and in
particular greater freedom for the trade unions of those countries
to reflect the experience and working class interests of their
members ... the General Council suggest to all their affiliated
unions that they also should reconsider their attitude towards
visits of delegations to or from any of those countries whose
troops have invaded Czechoslovakia."
It had become a feature of TUC responses to crises involving
the Soviet Union to condemn the whole society for the actions of
its government. This stemmed from its perception of a communist
society as a totality in which everything and everyone was
subjected to the control of the Communist Party. It had no such
perception of the USA which it defined as a pluralistic society
with many interest groups acting independently and without
303
responsibility to each other. This anomalous behaviour was
described by Ken Gill, representing the Draughtsmen's and
Allied Technicians' Association at the 1968 TUC, when he said
that the movement of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia had been
described as Soviet imperialism but "have we, as the British
Trade Union Movement, always opposed every aspect of British
imperialism, and when we have failed to oppose those aspects
have we been boycotted by the rest of the world trade union
Movement?" He added that the British trade union movement
"has very firmly declared itself against the action of the United
States in Vietnam and whatever one may say about the situation
in Czechoslovakia it cannot be compared with the carnage that
goes on daily in that unhappy country. However . . . DATA, and
many other trade unionists here would never suggest that we
break our traditional bonds with the American trade union
movement . . ," 52
It was only unions in socialist countries that were held
responsible for the actions of their governments and penalized for
them. But, as after 1956, the penalties were short-lived and the
pressures for unity re-emerged. By 1975 the TUC had agreed that
"the time is ripe for an initiative to be taken to bring the two
world trade union centres, ie the WFTU and the ICFTU, more
closely together". The issue was raised again in 1979 but the
General Council declined to alter its policy of pursuing oaratlcl
relationships for fear of being expelled from the ICFTU. In the
meantime the ICFTU entrusted with the task of healing the
breach between itself and the WFTU was complaining to the
International Labour Organization that there was no freedom of
association in the Soviet Union.
By now the behaviour of the TUC was predictable. In a crisis
involving a conflict of ideologies the TUC would respond as if it
were seeking the seal of approval from the Foreign Office and
would advocate boycotts, sanctions or reprisals of one kind or
another against socialist trade unions. The events in Poland from
1980 confirmed this prediction. In 1980 following a strike in the
Gdansk shipyard, the trade union organization called Solidarity
was formed. It grew rapidly and displaced all of the existing
unions. The TUC General Council recognized it and the ICFTU
urged that it should be given full support. Assistance was
provided in money and kind. Both the European TUC and the
International Metalworkers' Federation shared in this gesture.
Virtually all of the Western trade union movements identified
304
with the new Polish development^ Then arising out of _tbe
union activity was suspended and many union officials were
arrested. Solidarity was disbanded. ,
No foreign troops were engaged in Poland yet stones circulated
about the involvement of the Soviet Union. The Soviet hand was
seen ever ^here, inevitably, from the Western point of view
witn s n ster implications. The General Counc. considered
Bering aU contacts with Eastern European national trade union
S but decided on this occasion to circulate them w
request for their views about the Polish crisis and asking if they
3d use their influence "to encourage an end t° Repression in
Poland. They were to be judged by their replies. Affiliated umons
TeSfw^S^rom the German Democratic Republic,
cSlovkia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Bdgo. . and Yugo.
lavia That from the GDR caused consternation in the 1 Ut
Genera Council for it accused the British of arrogance and
double standards, stating that their approach to Problems in
socialist countries was inconsistent wuh their att.tud t o the
denial of trade union rights in El Salvador and Sou th Africa,
The General Council reacted by severing relations with , the G DR
Free Trade Union Council, causing a rupture which has st.U not
been healed There was a similar reaction to the answer from the
e£nf Council of Czechoslovakia Trade Unions which blamed
the "destructive activity of Solidarity" for the crisis. The General
Councu however, decided not to break relations but to communi-
cate w th the CCCTU on ly for the purpose of restoring Solidary
The Soviet AUCCTU replied in more measured terms but
Sited that me Polish government was justified in its actions by
the pout cal character and intentions of Solidarity. The relationship
whh the AUCCTU was cooled by the reply but not broken oft.
The TUC attitude to Solidarity has remained unchanged even
though it no longer exists. On 8 October 1982, a new law was
nassed enabling trade union activity to be resumed. As a result,
en erprise 2ns were formed by former Solidarity members
whXere linked through 134 different fed— Jn Novenibe
1984 a new central union organization wasestabhshed called I he
National Trade Union Alliance. The TUC has no relations wuh
thfe bodv Bilateral relations between individua unions in Britain
and Mand have been slow to develop in the wake of the crisis.
305
In general, with the exception of Poland and the German
Democratic Republic, the attitude of the TUC towards union
centres in the socialist countries nowadays is distant but friendly.
The TUC is handicapped by its own affiliation to the ICFTU but
within this constraint it is willing to make informal contacts. The
TUC has continued with the mediating role it has played since
1917 though on a lower key and with less commitment than in the
interwar years. It has pressed, for instance, for the inclusion of
socialist trade unions in the European Trades Union Congress
but without success. But it has done nothing at any level to foster
relations between them. Yet the TUC is repeating its earlier
experiences. As the last crisis involving the Soviet Union is
receding in the memory of the TUC its attitude towards the
Soviet AUCCTU is mellowing. In a surprise move the TUC
General Council sent an official delegation headed by the
General Secretary to the Eighteenth Congress of Soviet Trade
Unions in March 1987. The last equivalent delegation to a
Congress of Soviet Trade Unions had been in November, 1924
when the TUC attended the Sixth Congress. After the break up
of the WFTU in 1949 there was no official contact between the
TUC and the AUCCTU until 1966 when a British delegation
visited Moscow. Then in 1972, Vic Feather, the TUC General
Secretary led a delegation of General Council members to the
Soviet Union. A Soviet delegation came to Britain in 1975, led by
A N Shelepin, the president of the AUCCTU, and discussed an
expansion of various forms of bilateral contacts "in the spirit of
co-operation which had existed between them during the war".
But before anything further was done the crises in Poland and
Afghanistan occurred and relations deteriorated. The next
official contact was the March 1987 one. This was followed within
a few weeks by another official TUC delegation, again led by the
TUC General Secretary, Norman Willis, to inspect the site of the
nuclear power disaster at Chernobyl. Clearly, unless another
international incident intervenes, there will be demands from
British trade unions for the TUC to re-establish formal links with
the Soviet AUCCTU.
Pressures for a formal institutional relationship with Soviet
trade unions have been re-inforced by re-alignments in the field
of international trade unionism. The ideological division created
in 1949 has been overcome by two important groups of workers.
There are signs that their example will be followed by others in ?
for example, the occupations dealing with medical work. The first
306
significant and permanent removal of the 'Cold War' barner -was
n "hen 25 entertainment and commuracations umons from
n sodatt and capitalist countries, founded "«»~
Federation of Audio-Visual Workers Union (FISTAV). their
Jrpo wafto enable unions to meet over common issue
irrespective of whether they were affiliated to the ICFTU or the
li/PTi I nr 10 neither Bv 1984 the number of affiliates had
I™ to 8 o whom were affiliated to the ICFTU and U
o h wVlU. Only unions in two -fr countries namely he
USA and West Germany, have refused to affiliate to he
International FISTAV was opposed by the 1CF1U ana rctuseu
af iha" ion to the European Trades Union Congress. It survived
th e PoHsh crisis It refused to recognize Solidarity as a bona f de
^ union which qualified for affiliation >»"«^*«£
■a neutral Dosition to preserve its own unity. A new. ™us"
Cunural I and Art WorkeYs' Union was accepted intomemhersh ,p
WM*# FISTAV with its headquarters in Pans, holds its
mcedngs a tcTnateiy in a capitalist or socialist country and
prS much opportunity ^?W<^^"£££
mnntries to mix with their socialist counterparts. Its. experience
SESTftom a trade union point of view this is wholly
Sd ™eS and probably the strongest pressure has come from
the formatonln September 1985 of a new miners' international
ndeTcretariat which encompasses miners from communist and
trace s^iaria Th NUM had consistently expressed
KSfflS ^vision which split the
mended bv all the major miners' unions except those from Wes
attended oy an in j NUM initiated talks
2RR&£^0& t^ CGT and the Soviet Miners
307
together in a single organization for the first time. Now miners
from capitalist countries meet with Soviet miners on a regular
formal and normal basis rather than fortuitously as previously.
Anti-Sovietism and Class Consciousness
The history of the attitudes of Western trade unions towards
the Soviet Union varies between countries. It shows a marked
distinction between Britain and the USA which has its basis in the
class character of trade unionism in the two countries at the time
of the Bolshevik Revolution. Tn Britain there was a sharp class
conflict between 1917 and 1926 with unions relying on industrial
action to achieve political ends, especially in the immediate
aftermath of the war. In this milieu some British unions envied
the Russian workers while others sympathised with them. The
result was a sense of identity with the aims of the Bolshevik
Revolution which was never entirely eradicated. It was re-
inforced by the Soviet victories in World War Two. The
American trade unions were in an entirely different situation
after 1917 for through their pursuit of business unionism they
were mostly propagators of the US capitalist ideology. Moreover
from 1918 to 1923 they lived through and collaborated with the
state oppression of political non-conformity and acquiesced in the
state destruction of the Internationa] Workers of the World, the
main union to challenge American political orthodoxy. They had
little class understanding of their own situation and, therefore, no
insights into the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution. In the main,
US trade unions welcomed the overthrow of the Czar in March
1917 but were out of sympathy with the Bolsheviks in October.
Once the anti-Soviet propaganda machine went into operation
the US trade unions went along with it and reinforced its impact.
That remained the position of the AFL even during the Second
World War. The CIO adopted a more sympathetic stance during
the war but its friendliness towards the Soviet Union was
dissipated during the 'Cold War. Thereafter the AFL-CIO was
an advocate of anti-Sovietism without any rank and file membership
constraints.
Anti-Sovietism is an essential element of capitalist ideology
with a specific objective, namely to undermine class analysis and
discredit socialism. Its purpose is not to clarify and illuminate the
internal conditions and external aspirations of the Soviet Union
but to distort them in every way possible to protect capitalist
308
power relations. In so far as trade unions ^re anti-Soviet
fherefore, they are collaborating with capitalism andweata
heir own positions in the class struggle. Events since 19 7 have
shown that British unions, however, have never been fully or
consistently collaborative. Their anti-Sovietism has vacillated In
simplistic terms it can be portrayed as a gut teelmg of class
SSS struggling for expression through a pervasive hostile
deo ogy Somltimes the gut feeling is dominant, as .between 1917
and 926 and during the Second World War. At other time , lt ,s
subdued or overwhelmed as during the crises in 1956, 1968 and
1980 82 But it has never been destroyed. Almost as soon as the
crises are over the feeling of identity re-emerges.
The mpact of the dominant ideology has varied over tirne^
between unions and at different levels f t ^TlTZ^
general its greatest impact has been at ^f*^^^
Union Congress because it is most amenable to pressures to
"mUy due to its relations with governments, with nation*
° m S bodies and with the International Confederation of
Ree Trade Unions. Official TUC advice to unions during
fnternational crises involving the Soviet : Uxhoi, -has «ntiy
conformed to Government policy and, therefore to the W^em
P,OT*%Vi« lor a. Chanr..! port.. Tlr< re.*
inforce the dominant ideology they make d.ssent d.fficu U by
trade union movement can be persuaded to work against
309
best interests. When it condemns Soviet socialism il is undermining
socialism itself and, therefore, its own aspirations.
FOOTNOTES
1 . Trade Unions and the Government by V L Allen, p. 162.
2. British Labour Delegation to Russia, 1920, Report, London 1920, Also
Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution by Stephen White, London, 1979,
p. 14.
3. Russia The Official Report of the British Trades Union delegation to
Russia in November and December 1924.
4. ibid, p. 1,
5. Bramlcy died of cancer on 14 October 1925 and was succeeded by W M
Citrine in 1926.
6. In Russia Now by Sir Walter Citrine, 1 942, p. 12.
7. The only detailed history of the formation, life and ending of the
Committee is The United Front by Daniel F Calhoun, Cambridge, 1976
where there is much information hidden behind a barrier of prejudice. See
also TUC Annual Reports, 1924, 25 and 26. Also I Search for Truth in
Russia by W M Citrine. 1936; In Russia Now by Sir Walter Citrine. 1942;
Men and Work; An Autobiography, by W M Citrine, 1964; and Forty-Five
Years, International Federation of Trade Unions bv Walter Sehevencls.
1956-
8. Calhoun, op cit, p. 250 and A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations by W P
and Zelda K Coates. 1 943. pp. 228-232.
9. Labour Monthly, June 1926, pp. 375-8.
10- / Search for Truth in Russia, p. 300
IT. Allen, op cit., pp. 32-3.
12. ibid.
13. See The Post-War History of the British Working Class by Allen Hurt.
1938, for details of the activities of the three organizations.
14. TUC Report, 1935, p. I l l,
15. ibid, p. 112.
16. Sec Allen, op cit, pp. 63-73.
17. History of Anglo-Soviet Relations bv W P and Zelda K Coates. p. 632.
18. ibid.
19. My American Diary by Sir Walter Citrine. 1941 , p. 241.
20. W P and Zelda K Coates, op cit. pp. 677-678.
21. ibid, p. 680. It was said that the German Military Command expected
victory in six weeks.
22. TUC Report. 1941 , p. 253.
23. The Road to Stalingrad by John Erickson, London , 1 975, p. 212.
24. The Eight Point Declaration is published in Russia Now bv Sir Walter
Citrine, pp. 118-119.
25. Forty-Five Years. International Federation of Trade Unions by Walter
Schcvcnels. pp. 295-296.
26. For details of the formation of the WFTU from the 1943 Trades Union
Congress onwards see TUC Reports for 1943, 1944, 1945 and 1946.
310
27. Reprinted in The TUC and Communism, published by the TUC, March,
1955.
28. ibid, p. 3.
30 Tiie • Militancy of British Miners, by V L Allen, pp. 121-124.
31 '. See Trade Union Leadership by V L Allen, pp. 289-3 12 for an examination
of the WFTU Executive Board Minutes.
32. Organized Labor in American History by Philip Taft, New York,
1964, p. 597.
33. The Hoffa Wars by Dan E Moldea, New York, 1978, p. 32,
34 ibid, pp. 32-33. a v i
35. The U AW and Walter Reuther by Irving Howe and B J Widick, New York,
1949 pp. 194-197.
36. Recent History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 1939-1965,
Progressive Publishers, Moscow. 1979, pp. 121-122.
37. ibid. pp. 196-197.
38. Taft, op cit. p. 623.
39. ibid, p. 624.
40. ibid, p. 628. , ,
41 . The Great Fear. The And -Communist Purge under 1 ruman and Eisenhower,
by David Caute, p. 353.
42. ibid, pp. 353-4.
43. Taft, op cit. p. 624.
44. ibid. p. 627-628.
45. Howe and Widick, op cit. p. 267. 1 •
46 The public explanation for its disaffiliation concerned domestic US trade
union politics. The United Automobile Workers had withdrawn from the
AFL-CIO and had affiliated separately to the ICFHL This claimed the
AFL-CIO. was an offence to its integrity so it withdrew from the It* ! U.
47 . TUC Report , 1956, p. 194.
48 . TU C Report , 1 957 . p . 1 95 .
49. TUC Report, 1957, p. 413,
50. Trade Union Leadership, op cit, pp. 30 1 -306
51. TUC Report, 1967. p. 291.
52. TUC Report, 1968, p. 485,
53. See TUC Report 1980. p. 213.
54. See TUC Report, 1982, pp. 220-221 .
311
Chapter Thirteen
The Peace Movement and the Enemy
Peace Activity During War
There were various forms of peace action in Britain this
century before the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament though none was sustained and national in scope.
By and large the anti-war protests were directed at particular
wars whilst they were in progress and this gave rise to difficulties
for they had to contend with populist expressions of patriotism
and jingoism. They tended to be marginalized and projected not
as anti-war but as acts of treason. For example, all the obstacles
encountered by peace activists were present during the Boer War
which started in the autumn of 1899 and lasted for 32 months.
The main opposition to the war came from a section of the
opposition Liberal Party, supported by the two main socialist
organizations, the Independent Labour Party and the Social
Democratic Federation. The war, however, was generally popular.
Even the conduct of the war did not evoke opposition. There was
some criticism of, but no general revulsion against, the British
Army policy of burning Boer farms and of establishing concentra-
tion camps in which some thousands of Boer women and children
died. The widespread pro-war sentiment was expressed at times
through violence against those opposed to the war. Two meetings
of the young Member of Parliament, David Lloyd-George, were
broken up because he was opposed to the war. The Liberals were
divided into the Liberal Imperialists and the pro^Boer or Little
Englander factions. Members of this latter group were accused of
a lack of patriotism, defeatism and treason. It was reasoned that
if they were in favour of peace they would compromise with the
enemy and, in effect support the Boers. A League of Liberals
Against Aggression and Militarism was formed, to which David
Lloyd-George belonged, but it had little consequence.
After the Boer War had ended the issue of war loomed large in
discussions at international Labour and Socialist gatherings. It
was the Socialists and not the Liberals who prescribed how to
avoid war. The International Socialist Congress in 1907 spelled
out the prescription. It emphasized that imperialism was the
prime cause of war and that, therefore, the working class had a
common interest in ail countries to unite and oppose it. The
prescription was based on international working class solidarity.
Every Socialist or Labour Party should use all of its power to
prevent war and then, if war broke out nonetheless, they should
pursue militant anti-war policies and "use the political and
economic crises created by the war to rouse the populace from its
slumbers, and . . . hasten the fall of capitalist society". 1 The
implication was that the working class should call general strikes
in the affected countries. This seemed a real possibility when the
discussion was about war threats. But when war actually broke
out in August 1914 the working classes in Germany, Britain and
France became enveloped in patriotism and war opposition
crumbled. GDH Cole described the events in Britain. He stated
that "the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, after
taking part in peace demonstrations up to August 4th, 1914,
speedily rallied to the national cause, leaving the ILP and a
majority of the British Socialist Party to form a small minority in
opposition . . . The Labour Party, which began by urging the
working-class movements to concentrate on measures for the
relief of distress, was soon involved, jointly with the other
political parties, in a recruiting campaign. The Trades Union
Congress issued a strongly worded appeal for soldiers . . .
Undoubtedly at this stage, and throughout the earlier part of the
War, the overwhelming mass of working-class, as of other
opinion in Great Britain, was strongly "pro-war", just as it was in
France, or Germany, or even Austria-Hungary. Everywhere in
Western Europe, the declared Socialist policy of opposition had
dramatically collapsed; and the small minorities which opposed
the War were for the time driven almost to silence."^ The
experience of the Boer War was thus repeated though the lesson
was more bitter and unpalatable. Fine phrases about international
solidarity had come to nothing. Even individuals who did not
display their commitment to war by volunteering for military
service were sought were sought out for ridicule and social
ostracism. Those who refused to serve were imprisoned. Tt was
illegal to profess a conscientious objection to war.
Whilst the patriotism unleashed by the declaration of war
overwhelmed opposition to it, it did not eliminate it. Small
socialist groups survived and slowly as the material conditions of
313
the war changed they gained strength. The sheer length of the
war and the horrendous, senseless slaughter undermined the
commitment to it. A Peace Conference, attended by militant
shop stewards and socialists, was held in Leeds in June 1917 and
called for the end of the war and the formation of Workers* and
Soldiers' Councils of the kind formed by Russian workers. But it
had no formal identity nor did any of the peace activities. Then in
1917 the Russian workers showed British workers a way out when
they seized power in November and immediately issued a peace
decree. The signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918
reminded British workers of their war weariness. An anti-war
movement began to emerge and to gain momentum but it
remained marginal to the war effort.
Peace Activity in Peacetime
The bloody and exhausting First World War gave rise to cries of
"Never Again". For almost a decade and a half the British people
were sickened by the thought of war. And as no Western govern-
ment could actually afford to wage war no pressure was put on
people to change their views. A peace industry flourished
through the League of Nations. The Oxford University Union
held a debate in February, 1933 which resolved that "this House
will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country." It was
given world-wide prominence as an indicator of pacifist senti-
ments in Britain. The Peace Pledge Union was formed in
October, 1934 when Canon 'Dick' Sheppard of St Martin-in-the-
Fields appealed to men to sign a pledge stating *'T renounce War
and never again will I suport or sanction another, and I will do all
in my power to persuade others to do the same". By the middle of
1936 the Peace Pledge Union had 100,000 male members and it
was seeking a similar number of women members. Peace societies
flourished in universities. Much literature was published which
declaimed war. 3 There were massive majorities against a range of
war options in the Peace Ballot which was organized by the
League of Nations in 1935. Both the TUC and the Labour Party
assisted with the Ballot in which more than 11 ,600,000 votes were
cast. War, it was felt, had become too terrible to happen with the
invention of aeroplanes, poison gas and high explosives. Five
main questions were asked starting with 'Should Britain remain a
member of the League of Nations?' and progressing to whether
military measures should be used to stop one nation attacking
314
another. Almost as many people, 90.13 per cent, favoured
prohibiting the manufacture and sale of arms for private profit as
wanted an all-round reduction of armaments. 87 per cent
supported economic sanctions to prevent one nation from attacking
another. 4 , , ...
The opinion in Britain which favoured peace and reconciliation
was not harnessed into a movement. It did not have an
institutional expression commensurate with its importance. It was
reflected in the policies of the Communist and Labour Parties but
the former was tinv and the Labour Party, between 1931 and
1935 had only a rump of 60 Members of Parliament compared
with 517 who supported the 'National' government. It reflected,
in effect, a revulsion to war in general. It was based on a fear ot a
future world war and was not directed at any particular potential
aggressor. The anti-war feeling was at its climax when the
government was persuaded to support a policy of economic
sanctions against Italy for its wanton aggression against Abyssinia.
But public opinion was not enough to compel the governmen to
use sanctions as a serious and sustained attempt to destroy Italy s
war effort. Italy conquered Abyssinia in defiance of the League
of Nations in general and of Britain in particular. It was an
ominous sign. .
The British concern about peace was expressed against an
increasingly unstable and threatening international background.
The menace of European fascism was growing though there was
no common agreement about its danger. The threat to world
peace was the imperialism of Nazi Germany but there were
divided opinions about whether or not it was the main enemy
There were influential sections in the British Government and
media which were sympathetic towards Nazi Germany. But
increasing during the 1930s the desire for peace became an
^ afSut fascism. This created class divis.ons for it was . the
Labour Movement which showed greatest concern. The class
nature of peace activity was exacerbated by the admission ot the
Soviet Union to membership of the League of Nations, making a
popular front against war possible. The Western countries
however, not only refused to accept the Soviet Union as an ally
but were not sure that it was not the principal enemy The British
government showed its ambivalence by accommodating to the
wishes of Nazi Germany until 1939, when it was too late to take
preventative collective action. Under such circumstances it was
impossible to mobilize mass support for a peace movement i
Britain. Moreover, as the possibility of war increased through the
Nazi annexation of territories, so the discussion about avoiding
war grew less and a campaign to rearm gained momentum. The
Labour Movement was torn by conflicting priorities. It wanted to
stand for peace and disarmament on the one hand and yet rearm
against the aggressiveness of the fascist powers on the other. The
class character of the Spanish Civil War gave a further twist to
Labour s contradiction for it became clear there that Germany
and Italy could only be checked by superior military power. The
peace activists of the early 1930s became the advocates of re-
armament in the late 1930s. The transformation was completed
for most when the Second World War started. After the German
invasion of the Soviet Union the pacifist argument against war
was the only one to retain any legitimacy. The experience of the
First World War was not repeated for the Labour Movement.
There was a greater tolerance of individuals who conscientiously
objected to war but there was no movement from any quarter for
a peace settlement. Because the war was defined as a fight for
freedom and not as a result of imperialism there were no
demands from the Labour Movement to end it without victory.
Indeed, on the contrary, for the activists who in 1917 would have
been attending the Peace Conference in Leeds, were pressing for
the opening of a Second Front in 1942 to relieve the pressure on
the Soviet Union.
The Changed Character of War
War throughout history has had many causes but in capitalist
history its predominant structural cause has been the unequal,
antagonistic relations between countries. Capitalist countries,
like individual enterprises, can only thrive by being successful in
competition, and this entails seeking dominance in their markets.
They have to seek greater market shares at the expense of others
and gain market superiority by actually controlling markets and
sources of raw materials. The capitalist countries are always in
degrees of conflict with each other and war is one of the means
used to resolve it. In the past, moreover, war has had therapeutic
qualities for some countries. It has been used to overcome
domestic government problems by diverting attention to external
issues and by generating national unity in divisive circumstances.
It has acted as a release valve for countries trapped by the
contradiction which creates over-production and thereby rescues
316
them from the political and social consequences of economic
depression Armaments production is not dependent upon
rZket forces and though it generously generates profit it does
not toke Place simplv because profit can be made. It occurs
because ol the need for war but in the process it consumes unused
resources particularly labour, and by increasing the level of
resources p the ^ eve l of effective demand for goods and
" S » further economic activity. It is
not he <£Sv route out of a depression but it has been .a sure one
*S ^liable when other options, such f^^^
Hon and the discovery of new, untapped markets, have been
Sed For these reasons waging war has been a leg.timate part of
^SSRf war have been
m^ton^K* for it can have no other consequence,
han the annihilation of all the
wmmm
c onfined to the direct participants or borne by one class rather
reason for peace.
The Peace Movement
337
history he had written but this led him only to advise caution, to
oppose the development of the Hydrogen Bomb and to work to
maintain the US monopoly of the weapon. Oppenhcimer was one
of the authors of the Acheson-Lilienthal Report of March 1946
which formed the basis of the Baruch Plan. On 24th January 1946
the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization set up
an Atomic Energy Commission with instructions to make
proposals for "the control of atomic energy to the extent
necessary to ensure its use only for peaceful purposes" and for
"the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and
of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction." The
Americans used the idea of an international control commission
on which to base their own proposals to prevent the spread of
nuclear technology without interfering with their own monopoly.
This was the essence of the Baruch Plan. • It was vetoed by the
Soviet Union. Oppenheimer changed his attitude towards the
Hydrogen Bomb after Edward Teller had made the practical
breakthrough in 1951 . He said that the H Bomb was "technically
so sweet that you could not argue." 6 It was exploded for the first
time at Eniwetok in November 1952. Oppenheimer's voice was
muted on all questions, however, by the US administration's
efforts to declare him a subversive for his 'association' with
communists. It required great courage and self-sacrifice for an
American scientist to associate with peace initiatives at that time.
The freedom of assembly was not extended to those who desired
peace with the Soviet Union. Facilities for meetings were denied
them and when demonstrations were organized on the streets
they were physically attacked. For example the New York Mayor
O Dvvyer sent one thousand police to suppress a peace demon-
stration in Union Square m August 1950. No truly international
peace conferences could be held in the USA because the
government consistently refused to issue visas to suspected Soviet
sympathisers.
The Baruch Plan was a plausible alternative to the suggestion
of a preventative war with which some politicians and military
leaders on both sides of the Atlantic toyed, believing that the
USA should use its overwhelming military superiority to subdue
the Soviet Union before it acquired a nuclear capability sufficient
to counter that of the USA. This view was expressed by Bertrand
Russell in 1948 when he said:
The question is whether there is to he war or whether
318
there is not ; and there is only one course of action open
to us. That is to strengthen the Western Alliance
morally and phvsically as much and as quickly as
possible and hope it may become obvious to the
Russians that they can't make war successfully. If there
is war, it should be won as quickly as possible. 1 hat is
the line of policy which the Western nations are now
pursuing. They are preparing for whatever the Russians
may have in store. The time is not unlimited. Sooner or
later the Russians will have atomic bombs and when
they have them, it will be a much tougher proposition.
Everything must be done in a hurry ..."
Russell had an intense hatred of communism He believed that
the Soviet Union wanted to over-run Western Europe. He
painted a grotesque picture of the consequences if they were
allowed to do so.
-The destruction-, he stated, "will be such as no
subsequent re-conquest can be used. Practically the
whole educated population will be sent to labour camps
in NE Siberia or on the shores of the White Sea where
most will die of hardships and the survivors will be
turned into animals . . - Atomic bombs, if used, will at
first have to be dropped on W Europe since Russia will
be out of reach ... I have no doubt that America
would win in the end, but unless W Europe can be
preserved from invasion, it will be lost to civilization for
centuries. Even at such a price, I think war would be
worth while. Communism must be wiped out, and,
world government established."
This gross distortion of the character of the Soviet Union was
largelv shared by the American Presidents /™™ an ]0 a ™
Eisenhower, who held office from 1945 till the end of the 1950s
Both of them held the view that nuclear weapons, like conventional
ones, were to be used if necessary. On various occasions they
threatened to use the bomb and presumably believed, like
Bertrand Russell, that "you can't threaten unless you're prepared
to have your bluff called." 30 But it was one thing to engage ,n a
game of bluff when the Soviet Union did not possess nuclear
weapons and quite something different to do so after 1949 when
the Soviet Union began to stockpile its own bombs, even though
319
on a minimal scale compared to the USA. The game, too, was
changed by the invention of the Hydrogen Bomb, many times
more powerful than those bombs which devastated Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. The Soviet Union tested its own Hydrogen Bomb
in August 1953. This change in the balance of nuclear power
altered the awareness of many people to the dangers of nuclear
weapons because nuclear war, rather than a one-sided bombard-
ment, became a possibility. Bertrand Russell responded promptly
to the new circumstances. "The situation now," he said, "is that
we cannot defeat Russia except by defeating ourselves. Those
who still advocate war seem to me to be living in a fool's
paradise." 11 Russell made an analogy with duelling. "Duelling"
he said "was a recognized method of settling quarrels between
men of high social standing so long as the duellists stood 20 paces
apart and fired at each other with pistols of a primitive type. If the
rule had been that they should stand a yard apart with pistols at
each other's hearts we doubt whether it would long have
remained a recognized method of settling affairs of honour." 12
The first articulate opposition in the West to nuclear weapons
came from scientists in Britain and France, led by J D Bcrnal, the
eminent physicist from Birkbeck College, and Frederic Joliot-
Curie, equally eminent and the High Commissioner of the French
Atomic Energy Commission. Bcrnal was close to the British
Communist Party while Joliot-Curie was a card-carrying member
in France. Neither of these scientists was quietened by 'Cold War'
pressures. Each of them expressed his friendship towards the
Soviet Union frequently and openly and in the same breath
condemned the capitalist system. The British Association for the
Advancement of Science expelled Bernal from its Council in 1949
for stating that peace and capitalism were incompatible conditions
because in the capitalist world science is in the hands of those who
hated peace and wanted war. 13 Joliot-Curie. within a year, was
dismissed by the French Prime Minister from his post as head of
the French Atomic Energy Commission. Both Bernal and Joliot-
Curie were link-persons between Western and Soviet scientists
and helped to create a basis for international understanding.
Bernal defined the paramount need of the world as the
establishment of peace and joined with others in forming a new
organization, Science for Peace, in 1952 on this basis. For five
years this group was the principal anti-war platform for British
scientists. 1
The first major attempt to create an international movement
320
for peace was the Soviet sponsored World Congress of Intellectuals
in Breslau in August 1948 which launched an International
Liaison Committee of Intellectuals for Peace^ 1 his body became
the World Peace Council in April 1949 with Johot-Cune as its
President. One of the catalysts for an international peace torum
was the World Federation of Scientific Workers which was
established in 1946 from an idea by Bernal and with Johot-Cune
as its chairperson. The WFSW was not a trade union but a broad
association of unions and associations of scientific workers with
the aim of utilizing science for the promotion of peace and
welfare The World Peace Council became the umbrella organi-
zation for a number of national peace committees of which the
British Peace Committee was one. At this time 'peace was a
word denuded of its real meaning by the 'Cold War hysteria. A
'peace committee' was regarded as a communist front, as an
instrument of Soviet foreign policy. Every ^*™™Zl^t
which the Soviet Union was connected such as the Stockholm
Peace Appeal in 1950, which 14 million people signed and called
for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons the succession
of World Peace Congresses in Paris in 1949, Wa^aw 1950
Vienna 1954 and Helsinki in 1955 were all derided in he West as
Soviet propaganda stunts. When Professor Bernal and Ivor
Montague attempted to convene the World Peace Congres s m
Sheffield in 1950 the Labour government destroyed it by refusing
to issue visas to Soviet delegates. Despite the hostility a number
of peace groups were formed between 1950 and 1952 by members
of different professions in Britain . There were Artists for Peace
'the Medical Association for the Prevention of War , the
Musicians' Organization for Peace', 'Science for Peace and
Teachers for Peace' and each one was labelled as a communist
front organization and dismissed as irrelevant except as possible
CS AftTr § the n USA and the Soviet Union had acquired Hydrogen
Bombs by the mid-1950s the worst nuclear war scenario was
possible. The background was the 'Cold War' of which the logic
seemed to be war itself. The years were marked by events, any of
S could have triggered off a conflict. In
blockade of Berlin following the decision of the British ana
Americans to breach the Potsdam Agreement and establish a
West German state. Two years later the Korean War started and
the US administration debated whether or not to use atomic
bombs against the Chinese. The enormity of the gravity of this
321
situation was slow to dawn on non-communist intellectuals in the
West. Then quite suddenly they became aware of the cataclysmic
possibilities. Scientists began to recognize the social conse-
quences of their research, Bertrand Russell was at the centre of
the new realization. In 1955 he and Einstein issued a declaration
about the dangers of nuclear war, signed by Einstein during the
week of his death, and endorsed by nearly a dozen eminent
scientists, including a number of Nobel Prize winners. Its
signatories spanned East and West, communists and non-
communists. The Declaration, which emphasized that neither
side could hope for victory in a nuclear war and that there was a
real possibility of the extermination of the human race by dust
and rain from radio-active clouds, asserted that it was only
through an avoidance of war, and not just a prohibition of nuclear
weapons, that such a catastrophe could be avoided. This belief
was based on the assumption that a straightforward prohibition
would be breached if a war with conventional arms broke out. 15
All this time the communist scientists campaigned for peace in
the background. The difference was that what they were saying
and doing were being repeated by hitherto indifferent or even,
like Russell, hostile scientists. Russell followed the Declaration
by convening the Pugwash Conference on Science and World
Affairs in 1957. This brought together highly placed scientists
from East and West on a regular basis. 16 Four years earlier, J D
Bernal had started a similar venture when he organised "a world-
wide meeting of scientists of such repute that governments would
pay attention to their conclusions on nuclear warfare and other
subjects." 17 The Pugwash Conference was an imitation of
Eternal's. Through it and the meetings of scientists it stimulated,
discussions about peace and nuclear war ceased to be the
prerogative of communist scientists such as Bernal and Joliot-
Curie. Nonetheless peace conferences continued to be regarded
by Western governments as communist inspired.
The years following 1956 were propitious for debate in Britain.
The British Communist Party had suffered a severe rupture
through the disaffection of many of those members who regarded
themselves as intellectuals, following Mr Khrushchev's revela-
tions about Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU and because
of the use of Soviet troops in the Hungarian uprising in 1956.
Ex-communists became the organizers of New Left groups which
dominated left-wing intellectual circles. Different strands of the
New Left took up the issue of nuclear weapons. Then, on 4th
322
October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world s first earth
satellite. A month later another Soviet satellite, better equipped
than the first was sent into space. With space travel possible,
nuclear weapons took on a new disturbing dimension. No country
was safe from them. No people could hide from them. Peace
Zcussions spread beyond the narrow circle of communists
Notel Prize winners and pacifists. A fear of nuclear war entered
The consciousness of many people and, for the first time m British
history a mass Peace Movement began to form.
The various groups adopted distinctive positions in relation to
nuclear weapon! One of them advocated multilateral
another proposed a ban on tests, while a third was in favour of
unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. The strands began to
merge in 1957 and 1958 to demand a general renunciation of
3r weapons by Britain. The organization* basis of this new
Peace Movement was the Peace Pledge Union which ted
organized protests against US nuclear weapons in Britain Stt.ee
1959 the Friends Peace Movement and the Council for the
Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Tests, formed mainly by women
members of the Hampstcad Labour Party This to Cgg^
eminent names in support of its aim and when it had J B Priestley
Sn Juhan Huxley, Canon Collins and Bertrand Russell on its Us
ft described itself as a national 'Campaign Committee for Nudear
Disarmament' The genesis of the Campaign for Nuclear Dis-
ar^nTwas thus" formed.'* Mrs Peggy Duff became i s
oman zing secretary and Bertrand Russell its president. Mass
suppor for the Campaign was provided by the Easterfc^
1958 from Trafalgar Square to the Weapon 'Research ^^Establish-
ment in Aldermaston, Berkshire. The idea for the march did not
originate with CND but from a Direct Action group. CND,
however took it over and benefited from its tremendous
mobilizing effects. It transformed CND from a Hampstead clique
Mo a Sal protest movement. Hundreds of local groups were
formed public meetings were held and Parliament was lobbied.
Some trade unions took up the issue and voted with const rtuency
Labour Parties in October, 1960 to ^/^^
disarmament the policy of the Labour Party Th , part^
achievement was short-lived for the opponents of unilateralism
within the Labour Party regrouped and reversed the policy the
following year. The reversal however, was more an indication of
he depth'of the opposition the
aroused in the establishment than a sign of weakness. The new
323
Peace Movement cut across social class lines and brought
together disparate and previously uncooperative political groups.
Its strength was its spontaneity about a single issue which was
paramount over ideological divisions.
Peace as an Antithesis of* Capitalism
As capitalism traverses its historical path, exploiting workers,
perpetuating inequalities and deprivation, pitting individuals,
institutions and nations against each other in a struggle for
survival, legitimizing the use of force as a solution to their
disagreements and utilizing war as a means of resolving its
problems, all in order to maximise private profits, then it turns
people's attitudes against it until they see it as the source of their
problems and desire to change it. In this way capitalism carries
the seeds of its own transformation. This process is historically
inexorable but it has many fluctuations, moves along an indeter-
minate time scale and is manifested in a variety of ways which
counter the values of capitalism, undermine its legitimacy and
force it to act contrary to its own best interests. The process is
expressed through the growth of trade unionism, the rise of
revolutionary political parties, the extension of public as against
private enterprise and by the growth of the Peace Movement.
The Peace Movement represents the antithesis of the values of
capitalism as much as collectivism does. Nuclear weapons
highlight this contradiction, for capitalism, which thrives on wars
by using them for therapeutic purposes, can have no use for a war
which threatens its own destruction by causing universal annihila-
tion. Yet nuclear weapons are nonetheless manufactured. Why
should they be produced if they not only do not possess any
socially useful qualities but have such a universally harmful
potential? And why, moreover, should the Peace Movement be
reviled so much by the organs of capitalism simply for protesting
about weapons which, in effect, threaten the very existence of
capitalism? This does seem to be a rather sick paradox.
The answer lies in understanding the structural implications of
a universal prohibition of nuclear weapons. The Peace Movement,
by insisting that there should be no production or use of nuclear
weapon, challenges the right of the nuclear weapons producing
countries in the West to operate according to their own capitalist
criteria. Production in these countries is determined by the
exchange-value of goods and services and not by their socially-
324
useful qualities. It may add to the profitability or a good tor it Xo
be socially useful but it is not necessary. It a good cannot make a
profit then no matter what its qualities irwil not be produced
within the market. In the same way, a good will be produced if it
is profitable even though it may have no socially useful qualities
This is the case, for instance, with the production of drugs such as
heroin The point is that the criminal futility of using nuclear
weapons has no bearing on whether or not they are produced in
th Nudear weapons are not, however, produced through a free
market They are produced through government decisions and
purchased with public money. There is a limited amount of
competition between privately owned armaments manufacturers
to whom the profits of production go. Nuclear weapons are,
therefore, produced for profit just as cornflakes arc. The profits
from cornflakes, however, are derived from a consumer demand
over which the producers through trade names and advertising
exercise only a limited form of control. In the case of nuclear
weapons there is no consumer influence, only consumer sanction.
The decision to produce is made by politicians largely m response
to pressures from the users, that is the military and the
producers, that is industry. The military-industrial complex,
therefore, through its vast influence over government, makes the
decisions about the production of nuclear weapons. Th^ are
engaged in a self-perpetuating creation of financial profits. I he
consumers, who are those deemed to be protected by nuclear
weapons, only enter the decision-making stage at times ot
presidential and general elections and only then when they are
faced with alternative options. At no time are they consulted
about decisions. Instead they are subjected to perpetual propaganda
about the threatening nature of the enemy to ensure that they
freely give their sanction to production. A movement to stop the
production of nuclear weapons entirely would both end a
lucrative source of profit and would challenge the power of the
military - industrial complex to determine government decisions.
But to do this it is necessary to be able to control multinational
companies for they are the chief profit beneficiaries. 1 hey at the
tail end of the Twentieth Century, are the bulwarks ot capitalism
The Peace Movement, in effect then, poses the power of peacefu
popular protest against the institutional power of vast international
corporations. It also, by implication, questions the definition ot
the Soviet Union as the enemy and challenges the right ot
325
capitalism to protect its hegemony by force. It is in this sense that
peace activities are the antithesis of capitalism.
As it is generally recognized that nuclear weapons possess no
socially useful qualities and constitute a danger to the mass of the
people in all countries both by the political instability they create
and though the risk of use through accident, their elimination
would be generally beneficial to people. The irony in this
situation is that in the USA, where the dangers are less apparent
than in Europe, there are likely to be no immediate social
advantages from ending the misappropriation of resources for
nuclear weapons production. In this respect, there is a marked
distinction between the USA and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet
Union a ban on production would release resources for socially
useful activities because the distribution of resources is planned
and a rational decision would ensure that the transition took
place. In the USA, on the other hand, where nuclear weapons
production has begun to figure as a core element for much
economic activity, a ban on production would close an avenue of
immense financial profit for a small number of powerful
multinational companies without creating any immediate tangible
social and economic benefits for ordinary people because there is
no mechanism in the market for transferring resources from
negative to positive uses. The only market criterion is profitability.
The likely immediate effect of banning nuclear weapons in the
USA would be increased unemployment and social deprivation.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
This organization has become the predominant element in the
British Peace Movement. Other sections are significant for their
special qualities. For instance, the Friends Peace Committee has
played a consistently remarkable role through its understanding
of the Soviet Union while the British Peace Assembly, the
successor to the British Peace Committee, has special relations
both with British trade unions and Peace Movements in socialist
countries. Political parties, trade unions in general and peace
action groups of various kinds have mainly used the umbrella
organisation, CND, for peace purposes, which has also been the
medium through which ordinary people in towns and villages
throughout Britain have channelled their protests against nuclear
weapons.
In its early days CND was comprised of people who had
326
recently lived through the ideological pressures of the Cold War
so that inevitablv they possessed some feelings of anti^Sovtetisrn.
Yet anti-Sovietism did not appear to play an important part of the
earlv affairs of CND. It derived its momentum from the fears ot
ordinary people about the British atomic bomb. Its unifying
slogan was 'Ban the Bomb\ There were, on the other hand, some
anti-communist feelings amongst its members. A number of the
prominent ones had recently left the Communist Party while
others like Bertrand Russell, were implacably anti-communist
Dora Russell, whose peace activities preceded the fortiori ot
CND explained her experience with it. "The new CND m
Britain " she wrote, "campaigning only for nuclear disarmament
soon made it clear that they did not want any association with
pacifists who sought understanding or had any connection with
communist organizations or countries. Those who had been doing
the most work for peace were now required to 'keep away to
avoid CND being smeared." 19
Despite this political cautiousness CND marshalled an impressive
display of protest by 1960 through attracting people on to the
streets and gaining the official support of the Transport and
General Workers' Union and other unions. Its early climax came
when it shattered the bi-partisan policy on defence at the Labour
Party Conference in 1 960. This period of euphoria was brief tor in
the month of its first major success a split occurred m its ranks
through the classic method of forming a splinter group to push
CND further than it was capable of going without damage to
itself The question of direct action had plagued CND rorn the
outset but it came to a head when the '"Committee ot 100 was
formed by Bertrand Russell in October 1960 from an initiative
provided by an American, Ralph Schoenman, to pursue a policy
of mass civil disobedience. Many activists were siphoned off wmlc
others became disillusioned. The consequence could hardly have
been better planned for the government. The Labour Party
rejected unilateralism in October 1961. From that time CND
activity declined and so did that of the "Committee of 100 which
was disbanded in 1968. The damage had been done. As Frank
Allaun commented, "The Sixties were a bad decade for CND.
Thev came in with a bang and went out with almost nothing.
Many people thought that CND was finished during the period
of detente but the consciousness which had been aroused
between 1957 and 1962 did not disappear entirely. Many of its
activists became involved in the Peace in Vietnam campaign from
327
about 1968 till 1972 thus maintaining and extending the practice
of anti-war protests. Its organization was maintained by a
skeleton group of activists during difficult years so that when
NATO decided to locate American cruise missiles in Britain in
December, 1979 it was able to mobilize public protests. CND's
growth after 1979 was phenomenal in terms of its national
membership and the proliferation of local groups. In 1983, before
the cruise missiles had arrived in Britain, CNDs membership was
almost 80,000 with more than 2000 local groups and organizations
affiliated to it. There was hardly a hamlet in Britain without its
CND group. Its post 1979 demonstrations dwarfed earlier ones. It
became a major peace organization with a cohesion unequalled
anywhere in the Western world. It contained none of the
fractures which afflicted the unity of the West German Peace
Movement nor did it have the inhibitions about its aims which
hampered the development of peace organizations in France or
the limited aims of the multitude of small and politically
ineffective groups in the USA. CND's influence spread quickly.
The Labour Party entered the 1983 general election with the
policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament and has continued to
endorse it. By 1987, 29 national trade unions, with a total
membership of 6.8 million, were affiliated to CND. It fostered
numerous direct action organizations by its existence and
example. It has risen to far greater prominence than it reached in
1960. Although CND failed in its major aim to prevent the
location of Cruise missiles at Greenham Common in England it
has remained as an influential organization with the facility,
which it lacked in 1960, of persisting in its policy of harnessing
public opinion against the war drive activities of NATO countries.
CND has undoubtedly been the prize target for the anti-peace
movement forces in the West. This was certainly the view of the
British government which, in its early anxiety about the phenom-
enal growth of CND reacted with gimmickry. It tried to meet the
CND head on by discrediting it in public through provoking a
Red Scare, claiming it was under the control of communists and
was receiving Russian money. When this failed CND was
depicted as a fringe organization comprising weird people. When
this also failed to stop CND's growth, wiser counsels prevailed
and more subtle divisive and subversive policies were contrived
which fed on existing doubts and prejudices in CND.
There was the attempt to distract the attention of CND from
NATO by suggesting that NATO was disintegrating anyway
328
through US impatience with the mealy-mouthed approach of
Europe to the Soviet Union on the one hand and Europe's dislike
of US belligerency on the other. There was talk of the emergence
of a European bloc which would stand between the Soviet Union
and the US. Such comments were made during the year the West
European Union was celebrating the 30th Anniversary of its still
birth. But NATO did not disintegrate through its own contradic-
tions and the West European Union remained moribund. CND
has not been persuaded to alter its demand that Britain should
leave the NATO Alliance.
Coincident with this attempted distraction the NATO high
command discussed the need to switch its emphasis from nuclear
to conventional weapons, suggesting that CND's main aim was
being largely fulfilled. Conventional and nuclear weapons were
described as alternative forms by pointing to the capacity of
Emerging Technology to prevent nuclear strikes. But this was a
trap, for the NATO policy was to build up both types of weapons.
NATO did not reduce its nuclear capacity. The West experienced
the worst of all possible worlds.
The third device was to encourage anti-Sovictism in CND thus
disabling it in its endeavour to reject nuclear weapons. In so far as
CND members endorsed the Western stereotype of the Soviet
Union they confirmed it as an enemy. Anti-Sovietism was
genuinely subversive of CND and the most successful of the
establishment anti-Peace Movement devices. Its basis was the
constant stream of propaganda discrediting every aspect of Soviet
life but its mechanism came from within the Peace Movement
itself.
Coincident with the new growth of CND, also following the
NATO decision in December 1979 to locate American medium
range nuclear missiles in Western Europe, was the creation of the
organization called European Nuclear Disarmament. This was
formed in the spring of 1980 around an appeal initiated by Ken
Coates of the Russell Peace Foundation in Nottingham, which
called for the withdrawal of all nuclear weapons from European
territory- It stated: il In particular, we ask the Soviet Union to halt
production of the SS.20 medium range missile and we ask the
United States not to implement the decision to develop cruise
missiles and Pershing TI missiles for deployment in Europe
The essence of the appeal, however, lay in two other paragraphs.
It stated i; We do not wish to apportion guilt between the political
and military leaders of East and West. Guilt lies squarely upon
329
both parties. Both parties have adopted menacing postures and
committed aggressive actions in different parts of the world."
Then, in a seemingly innocuous statement it added "At the same
time, we must defend and extend the right of all citizens, East or
West, to take part in this common movement and to engage in
every kind of exchange." Thus one paragraph apportioned equal
blame for the nuclear arms race between the USA and the USSR
while the other enabled END to make co-operation with the
Soviet Peace Committee conditional upon the settlement of the
"dissident" question in socialist countries.
The Russell Appeal, as it became known, was signed by many
people, including leading officials of CND such as Bruce Kent,
CND's new general secretary and Dan Smith its former secretary.
It was drafted by E P Thompson who contributed its political
emphasis and who became the principal advocate of END's aims
in the Peace Movement.
The Appeal led to the formation of a number of laterally
connected committees, for example an Inter-Party Parliamentary
Committee and an Inter-Party Trade Union Committee, the
activities of which were co-ordinated by a small central committee
consisting of E P Thompson, Bruce Kent, Dan Smith, Peggy Duff
who had been CND's first general secretary, and Mary Kaldor of
the Armament and Disarmament Information Unit at Sussex
University. Thus the basis for the END organization was laid. It
renounced any intention of building a mass membership and of
thus competing with CND. It concentrated on publication and on
communication with European Peace Movements which sympath-
ized with the Appeal, 21
END, its sponsors stated, is li a resource centre serving the
British Peace Movement, and in close association with CND. The
immense swell of European opinion for peace poses great
problems of communication: monitoring, exchanges, transla-
tions . , . Only a multi-national campaign, however loosely
coordinated, will be powerful enough; and sooner or later this
campaign must extend across to "the other side" also, in
independent forms critical of the militarist measures of their own
states . . ," 22 Its practical effect was to encumber CND with the
plausible but historically inaccurate thesis of equality of blame
between the superpowers, campaigning under the slogan 'dis-
solve the blocs 1 . It thus fed on anti-Soviet sentiment and drew
support from those in and around the broad labour movement
who were anti-communist. But its most crucial and critical role
.330
was to introduce into CND what is described as the human rights
issue, in doing this END continued the practice of its main
sponsor, the Russell Peace Foundation, whose "monitoring,
exchanges, translations ..." were mainly about dissident activities
in socialist countries, focussing attention on individual acts of
discrimination for whatever reason as a means of discrediting
socialist systems. END became, in effect, the vehicle for anti-
Sovietism in CND,
CND, under the influence of European Nuclear Disarmament,
established contacts with 'unofficial' peace organizations in
socialist countries, such as 'Charter IT in Czechoslovakia, the
Moscow Group of Trust, the Hungarian Peace Group for
Dialogue, Solidarnose in Poland and the East German Christians,
irrespective of their size or significance or of the consequences for
their relations with the principal Peace Movements in those
countries. Whenever CND delegations went to socialist countries
they insisted on having parallel itinaries with the 'unofficial 1
groups. CND became reluctant to attend international peace
conferences unless 'unofficial' peace groups were invited, even
when these conferences were held within socialist countries.
The influence of END was shown through CND's selection of
foreign peace groups for collaborative action. It has refused to
have any contact with the old established World Peace Council. It
formed alliances with anti-communist and anti-Soviet groups,
such as the small French peace group, Codine, rather than with
the much larger communist supported Movement dc la Paix. It
identified with the West German Green Party rather than the
communist supported Deutsche Friedcnsunion which sponsored
the Krefeld Appeal in November, 1980, with 6 million signatures,
pledging resistance to the location of American Pershing TI and
Cruise missiles in Western Europe. CND also expressed its
political preferences through its membership of the International
Peace Co-ordination Centre which was formed by the Dutch
equivalent of END, the Inter-Church Peace Council (IKV) in
September, 1981. The IKV is funded by Dutch churches of all
denominations to concentrate on research and communication.
The International Peace Co-ordination Centre became the nerve
centre for relations between Western and Socialist Peace Move-
ments and circulated guidelines to deal with official invitations
from Socialist countries which ensured that Western Peace groups
would always impose conditions which made communications
hazardous, relations fragile and confrontation likely.
331
Nuclear Parity
The insistence of the Soviet Union on maintaining military
parity with the USA, that is, until Mr Gorbachev announced a
unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests in August 1985, tormented
the British Peace Movement. It was used by the CND leadership
to give expression to anti-Sovietism but to many ordinary
members it created a genuine dilemma. Whenever the Soviet
Union took steps to keep pace with the USA it was blamed for
accelerating the arms race. In 1983, for instance, CND leadership
successfully moved a resolution at the CND Annual Conference
opposing the location of Cruise missiles at Greenham Common
but also condemning "the Soviet announcement of new weapons
deployments in Europe and the Western Atlantic, since Soviet
efforts for 'military parity' will inevitably result in another round
of weapons deployment by the USA and NATO under the guise
of further negotiation through strength" . CND subsequently
organized campaigns which implicated the Soviet Union as being
jointly responsible with the USA for the nuclear arms race.
The ordinary CND member is guided by the CND Constitution
which states that "it is opposed to the manufacture, stockpiling,
testing, use and threatened use of nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons by any country ..." This reflects an abhorrence
of all nuclear missiles anywhere, held by any country. Given the
destructive powers of nuclear weapons this is a wholly justifiable
sentiment but, rather like being totally opposed to sin, it is a
meaningless guide to action to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons carry innate dangers because they contain
substances which are dangerous to health in themselves. But in
this respect they are similar to nuclear power plants or dumps of
nuclear waste. By their very existence they are all potential
hazards to people's health. Apart from that, nuclear bombs are
inanimate substances which, like guns, are harmless in themselves.
They become weapons and a threat to people only in the hands of
people. They get their horrific meaning from social relationships.
In order to identify, therefore, the real threat which emanates
from the possession of nuclear missiles it is necessary to
understand the relationships of people who control them.
In context, this means analyzing the relationship between the
USA and its allies on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the
other. What are the dialectics of their relationship? What is the
catalyst which creates it? Who is reacting to whom? Until such
332
questions as these are answered it is not possible to frame an anti-
nuclear policy which bears any connection with reality. Policies
based on sentiment, gut reactions or derived from false assumptions
about the enemy are bound not simply to be inadequate but to
compound the problem. There is no alternative to a serious,
logically consistent analysis of international relations.
What does such an analysis reveal? It shows that socialism
arises out of the contradictions of capitalism with capitalism
standing in implacable opposition to it. The Soviet Union, which
represents socialism, stands, by its very existence, as a threat to
capitalism. It has, therefore, been attacked, economically desta-
bilized, ideologically undermined and militarily insulated. It has
been subjected to abuse, distortion and lies about its society. Yet
the Soviet Union has grown stronger; its own hegemony has
spread. In the inter-war it stood completely alone. Now it is at the
hub of a widening circle of allies. By the same process the sphere
of international capitalism is shrinking; its power is declining and,
with it, its ability to make private profit and to accumulate capital
is lessened. The visible appearance is a struggle between two
superpowers but it is in substance a new form of social
organization rising out of the contradictions of the old.
There is not, nor can there be, any equality of responsibility
between the USA and the Soviet Union in the arms race. The
catalyst lies in the Western struggle to preserve capitalist
hegemony against the encroaching forces of socialist forms. The
visible evidence is the Western struggle for markets and sources
of cheap raw materials. In doing this the West is compelled to
seek military superiority because that, in the last resort, is its only
legitimacy. Capitalism, despite the fine words of its political
leaders, has no moral superiority. It operates through stages of
exploitation of regions and countries but always of workers. For
every capitalist success there is on the reverse side a defeat for
workers, for the poor and the deprived. This process gives rise to
the contradictions which are transforming capitalist countries in
their own unique historical ways. The threat to capitalism,
therefore, is not exported from Moscow but arises from its own
condition.
The history of the relationship between the USA and the
Soviet Union since 1945 confirms the assertion that the West
continually seeks and depends on military superiority. From the
moment the victories of the Red Army over the Nazis put in
doubt Western military superiority the USA has been pre-
333
occupied with it. For a brief period after 1945 the USA believed it
possessed superiority. Then from the first Soviet test of an atomic
bomb in 1949 it pushed forward with increasing urgency to
intensify the destructive capabilities of its missiles. Every change
in killing power, in elusiveness, in speed, came from the USA.
The Presidential advisers advised superiority; the military-
industrial complex demanded it; America's NATO allies applauded
it. The only visible respite was during the period of detente in the
1970s, but "even detente went on against a background of forward
missile planning. In the governmental scientific advisory com-
mittees, the board rooms of armaments manufacturers and in
their scientific laboratories, the search for an intensified and
more destructive nuclear potential which had started with the
Manhattan Project continued.
At the end of detente, with the election of President Reagan,
military superiority was again acclaimed as the US goal. A
characteristic NATO response was published in The Times on
Monday 26 November, 1984. Its leading article, 5Wi column
inches long, unashamedly bared the hawkish breast of the
militarv-iiidustrial complex. It enunciated "the hard simple
principles of Mr Reagan's leadership for which he received such
decisive confirmation in the election . . . This principle is the
rcassertion of American power and self-confidence and an end to
appeasement ..." Reagan's second term of office, it stated,
liberated the United States "from the incubus of a period of
detente and appeasement". The Times was undoubtedly still
smarting from its own appeasement of Hitler in 1938. It presented
the Western stereotype of the Soviet Union with razor sharpened
lines. "Soviet society", it stated, "is mobilized for war, both a
shooting war and a class war. Since the Geneva Conference of
1922 Soviet officials have been currying Western economic
assistance to make up for their strategic weaknesses while their
leaders have used double-talk to conceal their aggressive inten-
tions against the free world." It quoted Zbigniew Brzezinski to
add that the Soviet Union is ; "a global power only in the military
dimension but in no other. It is neither a genuine economic rival
to the US nor - as once was the case - even a source of a globally
interesting ideological experiment'. The Soviet society, The
Times contended is "a system which operates on an inherently
outmoded, malevolent, discredited and dishonourable ideology:
an evil empire indeed." The Times gave President Reagan clear
advice: cut back and control the flow of information and
334
commodities to the Soviet Union; follow a policy of economic
discipline: create dissension in the Soviet Union between the
people and political leaders, and between Warsaw Pact countr.es
On the question of nuclear weapons it stated: "It has to be made
dear to the Soviet Union that their persistent struggle in these
peripheral areas makes it necessary for the United States to
maintain and improve its strategic nuclear superiority over Soviet
^Th^mes article was not a prescription for President Reagan
w an enunciation of the policies he was trying to follow Its
Tu P^eTarto dvise him not to deviate from them and to show
n^al of them. It revealed how the NATO _ nunc wjfe
With this very clear statement of intentions before it, how should
the- "soviet Union have reacted? ..
Tte Sovie™ Union reacted from the beginning by seeking
nuclear parity with USA, by attempting to emulate or neutralize
«e v advance made by the Americans. When the US improved
thfrlnge orThe "peed of missies, so did the Soviet Union when
t looted medium range missiles in Europe so
Union The Soviet response, however, was never immediate and
spontaneous. A. each vital stage there has been a pause and a
campaign "o stop the escalation. The Soviet Union engaged m a
FuXe-wide protest to stop the location of Cruise and Pershing
mSs In Western Europe; it initiated a world-wide campaign
he latest escalation, the American Strategy Defer, e
S"wh the protests failed the Soviet Union then tried to
e rieve the balance. It states publicly that it will never eonsciously
Stow itself to be put in a position of military inferiority and
unpreparedness, a/it was when the Nazis invaded its country on
22 The C Cam P aign for Nuclear Disarmament has judged these
reactions in different ways. Some have argued that two wrong
□o «t make a right'. In other words, the Soviet Umon should
Store the action! of the USA and pursue its own principled
course Others have said why allow an aggressive capitalist
country to determine the defence priorities of a socialist country;
more particularly, why should the Soviet Union allow the
Pentagon fo choose even its weapons? This is a highly plausible
~Z especially for those who believe that socialism is
mSy superior to capitalism . But it ignores the political realities
of the Soviet Union, both of its past and its present
it Soviet Union s perception of its external relations is
335
determined in large part by its history which has distinct strands,
some of which are still familiar and influential. The collective
memory of the Soviet Union recalls the Western capitalist
attempts to isolate, invade and destabilize it when it had not one
ally in the inter-war years. It recalls its unpreparedness when the
German army invaded on 22 June 1941 and the costs to the Soviet
people. It remembers an Allied war-time strategy which continually
sought to restrain and isolate Soviet influence. It remembers too
the nuclear posturing of successive American Presidents after
1945 with the often publicly avowed aim of liberating the Soviet
people from communism. For its own survival it had to be alert
and sensitive and suspicious about activities around its borders.
This collective memory is enlivened by the realization that the
USA is the only country possessing nuclear weapons which has
used them and through their use has been exhilerated by their
destructive powers. It has threatened to use them on at least
eleven occasions. The Soviet people, virtually surrounded by
American missile silos, would be unnatural if they were not
apprehensive about the US intentions towards them. The Soviet
people sensed danger when Cruise and Pershing missiles moved
into Western Europe and when the US resumed nuclear testing in
the Nevada Desert in March, 1986. The Soviet Union can make,
and has made, unilateral concessions, but it can never for long
neglect its defences without arousing the nightmares of its past
and fears about its future.
Some critics grant that the Soviet Union has to respond in some
way to the American war-drives but feel it is an unnecessary
acceleration of the arms race for it to do so by copying American
advances. The implication is that the Soviet Union is entitled to
defend itself but what does this entail? If the development of
weapons was stabilized then what would matter would be the
sheer weight of "fire-power'. With conventional arms this would
be counted in terms of men and women, guns, tanks, ships,
airplanes and the like. Parity in real terms would involve
organization and quality but these would not figure prominently
in any public discussion. Parity in terms of nuclear weapons is
different in that given the enormous impact of individual weapons
the level has long since been reached at which either side could
completely devastate the other and the rest of the world as well.
After that parity in numbers is superfluous. A policy which had
been intended to deter has developed into one which is capable of
mutually assured destruction.
336
Nonetheless calculations about superiority are still made in
terms of numbers of nuclear warheads or missiles. The US and
NATO both make calculations usually showing Soviet superiority
to justify increased defence expenditure. Other calculations are
made elsewhere, for example the Stockholm Institute for Peace
Research, which gives different results. 23 But by and large the
warhead count is now a diversion from those developments which
really determine military superiority. What matters in discussing
parity is whether the missiles are land, sea or air-based, whether
they are comparable in speed and range, what their relative
powers of elusiveness are, for these are the factors which
determine first-strike capability. The discussion about parity is
not about equality in numbers and types but about comparab e
abilities to survive and retaliate a first strike attack. Obviously
in making this assessment the speed with which missiles reach
their targets, their range, their ability to avoid detection are ot
prime importance. A technological innovation m any one of these
qualities could seriously adversely affect a survival response
Parity therefore involves responding to such changes. This point
was made clear by Marshall Sokolorskiy in 1963 when he stated;
-The rapid development of spacecraft and specifically ot artificial
earth satellites, which can be launched for the most diverse
purposes, even as vehicles for nuclear weapons, has put a new
problem on the agenda, that of defence against space devices -
PKO Tt is still too early to predict what line will be taken in the
solution of this problem but as surely as an offensive one .s
created, a defensive one will be too." 25 The Soviet Union has
responded similarly to subsequent developments. A failure to do
so could make retaliatory defensive action outmoded and
ineffectual. It could leave the Soviet Union defenceless Given
the record of Western belligerence that indeed would be an
unwise thing to do.
The dilemma for the Peace Movement is that if it reacts
positively to the Soviet case for parity it will be damned with the
nro-Soviet label and will suffer in consequence, from the general
effects of anti-Sovietism. CND has always sought to avoid doing
anything which could be interpreted as pro-Soviet in the belief
that this would destroy its non-aligned status. There ,s a mistaken
belief in CND that non-alignment means never identifying with
either side in the arms struggle, irrespective of the merits ot their
respective cases. It should mean that CND simply remains
organizationally autonomous with the freedom to decide its own
337
course and establish its own political priorities on the basis of an
analysis of the situation. If this means siding with the Soviet
Union CND should have the courage to say so and face any
consequences which might follow from it.
The Soviet Peace Initiatives
The issue of anti-Sovietism is not being tackled by the British
Peace Movement. This is partly because of the fear by the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that it would be accused of
being pro-Soviet and partly because of its ambivalence towards
the Soviet Union in any case. The public leadership attitude of
CND is set by the theory that the world is dominated by two
super-powers which have almost equal responsibility for the arms
race. This results in it making at least moderated accusations
against the Soviet Union no matter how it behaves. But in the
details of its relations with socialist Peace Movements the Inter-
national Committee of CND maintains a policy of camouflaged
hostility.
Yet at the same time the perceptions of many ordinary people
towards the Soviet Union, both within and out of the Peace
Movement, are changing in a positive way. The Western image of
the Soviet Union is undergoing serious revisions due to the series
of Soviet peace proposals made since August 1985 and the
changes under the headings of perestroika and glasnost which are
taking place within the Soviet Union. Although news about the
Soviet Union is still filtered through a generally hostile media, the
seriousness of the Soviet desire for peace is getting through.
Many people who hitherto unquestioningly accepted the Western
stereotype are now recognizing its distorting qualities. Misinform-
ation is becoming counter-productive in the West for it is being
seen as such. So in the dialectical interaction between Western
ideology and reality through which the perception of Soviet
reality is determined. Western ideology is slowly being discredited.
The Western governments are assisting in this process. As succes-
sive concessions have been made by the Soviet leadership, Western
governments have found reasons for failing to respond to them.
Increasingly the reasons have been recognized as excuses to
evade signing an agreement. In the case of France and Britain the
excuses have been exhausted and it is plain that they do not want
an arms agreement which would involve destroying the missiles
which they regard as their own.
338
The catalyst for the changes in consciousness was the Reykjavik
summit meeting between Mr Gorbachev and President Reagan in
October 1986. That meeting, scheduled as a mini-summit to arrange
an agenda for a subsequent meeting in Washington, suddenly and
unexpectedly became the venue for serious detailed negotiations
about an arms control package which hitherto had been described as
either a Soviet fantasy or subterfuge. There were in the region of
2000 representatives of the world's press observing the meeting,
sensing an agreement, and engaging in hour by hour speculation.
They were caught off their guard. Without foresight and wholly
unprepared they communicated their own excitement to their
readers. For a brief moment in contemporary history the facts about
Soviet policies were reported without first being filtered through an
anti-Soviet sieve. Readers were able to make their own judgements
about the outcome of the meeting. They were assisted in doing this
by the events which had preceded the meeting.
'The first tangible peace initiative by the Soviet Union which
broke the deadlock caused by the Americans" quest for superiority
and the Soviet chase for parity was the nuclear test moratorium
applied by the Soviet government unilaterally on 6 August 1985.
The Soviet nuclear testing programme was suspended in the first
instance until 1 January 1986. The US administration was invited
to join the moratorium and to resume the negotiations, which had
been ended by President Reagan, for a comprehensive test ban
treaty. It refused. The British government endorsed the refusal
because, it claimed, the Soviet Union would not accept an on-site
system of verification. The Soviet government extended the
moratorium unilaterally on three occasions. It lasted until
January 1987 and was, therefore, in force at the time of the
Reykjavik meeting.
When the first extension of the test ban was announced, Mr
Gorbachev proposed a step-bv-step plan to eliminate all nuclear
weapons on both sides by 'the year 2000. These were the
proposals of 15 January 1986. There were three stages: stage one
required the Soviet Union and the USA within the period of 5 to
8 years to reduce by one-half the stock of nuclear weapons which
could reach each other's territory; this stage entailed the ending
of nuclear tests and of the deployment of space weapons. Stage
two, which was to last for 5 to 7 years, extended nuclear
disarmament to all other countries and included the elimination
of tactical nuclear arms, namely those with a range of up to
1000km. Stage three completed the process of elimination until
339
no nuclear weapons were left. The scheme was given widespread
publicity in the socialist countries and evoked considerable
excitement there but in the West, after an initial sceptical
response, it was treated as a Soviet propaganda ploy and damned
with ridicule. It was rejected out of hand by the Western
governments. Even the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
made only a token response to it. In general, the response con-
firmed the belief that once a country is defined as the enemy then
everything it does or proposes to do has to be regarded with the
deepest suspicion, as a tactic, a maneouvre, a ploy with a
subversive intent.
The 15th January proposals were virtually forgotten by the late
Spring when two events occurred which made indents in the
consciousness of people generally in Britain and Western Europe,
though not so much in the USA. The first was the bombing of
Libya by US planes from British bases in April 1986. This act
evoked widespread protests in Britain which cut across social
class and party political lines. Large sections of the British public
were suspicious of American motives and were offended that the
British government should have given its support. The Peace
Movement was involved in organizing protests against the
American act and in doing so correlated the irresponsibility of it
with questions about the competence of the US President to
make decisions involving nuclear weapons. British people were
becoming more fearful of the US President than they were of the
projected enemy.
The second conscience changing event was the disaster at the
Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the USSR on 26 April 1986. On
that day explosions occurred in the fourth unit of the Chernobyl
power station. The explosions caused fire which extensively
damaged the reactor building, the equipment in it and the reactor
core, causing radioactive releases into the atmosphere. The first
indication in the West that the disaster had occurred was a cloud
of radioactivity drifting across Scandinavia. The staff at the
nuclear power plant at Forsmark in Sweden at first thought that
their own reactor was leaking but as reports of high radioactivity
came in from Stockholm, Helsinki and Oslo the Swedes sus-
pected a radioactivity leak in the Soviet Union. The Soviet
authorities then issued a statement that there had been an
accident in the Ukraine causing casualties. No details were given
at that stage.
It was immediately assumed in the West that the disaster was a
340
major one because of the scale of the increase in radioactivity ih
Sweden in relation to the distance between Sweden and the
Ukraine, which was about 800 miles. The assumption became the
basis for projections about the extent of the damage to the
environment and the number of casualties. In the absence of
detailed information from the Soviet Union it was reasonable to
expect such assessments to be made, as had been the case when
an accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear power
station in the USA in 1979 when the US Senate was informed
about it ten days after it had occurred. In the Soviet case 3 days
elapsed before the extent of the damage was known but by that
time the disaster had become the focus for an anti-Soviet
campaign. The dilemma which Western governments faced
between adopting a humanitarian attitude and exploiting the
occasion for their own political ends was short-lived. The
casualties became pawns as the West sought to exaggerate the
accident and then portray it as a result of Soviet communism,
despite the fact that between 1971 and 1984 there were 151
recorded accidents at nuclear power stations in 14 different
countries, including major ones in Britain in 1957 and the USA in
1973.
The Western media did not recognize any dilemma. The
United Press International quoted an unidentified resident of
Kiev as the source for a report that the death toll could exceed
2000. 26 The main US television networks, ABC News, CBS
News, NBC News and CNN, each repeated the UPI figure,
adding that it was an unconfirmed report. In Britain, the main
foreign news agency Reuters simply stated that "a reported 2000
deaths" had occurred. Additional information was allegedly
provided by a Dutch amateur radio operator who claimed to have
overheard a conversation between a Japanese operator and an
English speaking man with a heavy Russian accent who said that
there had been many hundreds of dead and wounded at Chernobyl
and two meltdowns instead of one. 27 The US Pentagon combined
the details of both sources in its own reports but claimed
credibility by stating that it possessed information from satellite
reconnaissance. The Guardian published the Pentagon claim,
"that a second Chernobyl reactor appeared to have suffered a
meltdown -or was now suffering one -and that uncontrolled fires
'spewing radiation 1 were still raging in the stricken Soviet plant.
Estimates of the dead and injured within 10 miles of the huge
radiation cloud . . . were put at 2000 to 3000 with the situation
341
possibly deteriorating/' 2 * The Guardian had a front-page head-
line which stated: "US estimates up to 3000 victims from satellite
information". 29 Earlier it had repeated a report that Minsk, the
capital city of Byelorussia, about 300 miles to the north, had been
evacuated; that' Soviet medical teams trained in nuclear decon-
tamination had been flown in from Poland, Czechoslovakia and
East Germany and that nuclear technicians were being summoned
to Chernobyl from all parts of the Soviet Union .
The picture of alarm was accompanied by open hostility
towards the Soviet Union. For example, the US Senator Steven
Svmms from Idaho stated that his only regret was that the
accident had not occured in the Kremlin. 30 The New York Times
commenting on European press reports, stated that "French and
German papers see the disaster as the result of the secretive,
authoritarian system of making decisions without involving the
people whose lives it rules and failing to allow open debate on
nuclear issues. They point out that it was the militaristic urge to
disregard civilian needs that led to negligence in setting nuclear
standards". :M Most Western governments declaimed against the
alleged "habitual secrecy" 1 of the Soviet Union. President Reagan
said that the attitude of the Soviet Union "manifests a disregard
for the legitimate concerns of people everywhere" and contrasted
the openness of the West with the Soviet Union's "secrecy and
stubborn refusal to inform the international community of the
common danger" from the nuclear accident 32
Within a day of the Western claims that there were 2000 to 3UUU
casualties, the Soviet authorities announced that 2 people had
died and 197 had been admitted to hospital of whom 49 were
released almost immediately and 18 were in a serious condition.
The Soviet announcement was received with disbelief and did not
stem the exaggerations. This prompted the chief of the press
department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry to say: "I get the
feeling that the American Press is not happy there are so few
victims". 33 The claim that there had been two meltdowns
however, was retracted by the US White House task force which
was monitoring the disaster. Mr Lee Thomas, the chief of the task
force and the head of the Environment Protection Agency said
'There has been a *>ood bit of conjecture about that but the
information T have . ~ . is that we don't have any indication of a
problem at that (second) reactor . . ." 34 The US officials who had
said there was a second meltdown refused to explain the reason
for their claim. As the days went by it became clear that the
342
Soviet version of the causes and impact of the 'disaster was
correct. Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency
visited Chernobyl and confirmed that version. From the day-
following the disaster about 48,000 people were evacuated from a
30 kilometre radius around Chernobyl. The fires were extin-
guished. The affected unit was encased in concrete. The number
of deaths increased. By 12 May, eight people had died and 35
remained in a critical condition. Altogether 31 people died as a
direct consequence of the disaster.
The Soviet government was clear about the purpose of the
misinformation campaign. When Mr Gromyko nominated Mr
Gorbachev to be the General Secretary of the CPSU in March
1985, he said: "We live in a world in which figuratively speaking
various telescopes are aimed at the Soviet Union. They watch,
just waiting for some sort of crack to appear in the Soviet
leadership" 35 Mr Boris Yeltsin, the Secretary of the Moscow
Communist Party, was convinced that the Western media
believed they had delected such a crack and were determined to
expose it. He said "Our ideological opponents do not miss a
single opportunity to launch yet one more campaign against the
USSR. The bourgeois propaganda media arc concocting many
hoaxes around the accident". There was, however, an immediate
practical reason for maligning the Soviet Union. The West was
under pressure from the non-aligned states to respond to the
Soviet proposal for a moratorium on nuclear tests. The principle
argument against it was about the difficulty of verification, with
the implicit underlying assumption that the Soviet Union would
cheat if permitted to do so. The Chernobyl disaster was used to
buttress this objection for it was argued that if the Soviet Union
was so secretive about the details of a nuclear disaster which had
international effects then how could the West have confidence in
any agreement that it would allow on-site verification of arms
control regulations. If, it was alleged, the Soviet Union is
secretive about its nuclear power stations how much more
cautious will it be with respect to military installations?
This use of the Chernobyl disaster was undermined for the
West by two repercussions. The first was the boomerang effect.
Each of the Western countries had nuclear power plants over
which there was some public disquiet. The exaggerations of the
Chernobyl disaster magnified the possibilities of disasters else-
where. Though people in Western Europe were worried about
nuclear fall-out after the Chernobyl explosion they become much
343
more anxious about fall-out from their own disasters. The anti-
nuclear power movement grew in the face of government
opposition.
The second repercussion was the heightened consciousness
about the dangers of nuclear war. The radioactive cloud drifted
from Chernobyl across Austria, to Switzerland and Italy. It
reached Britain by 3 May and was carried by south-easterly winds
over much of England and Wales. Every country in mainland
Europe had experienced higher than normal radiation levels by
the time the cloud reached Britain. Wherever it went on its
unpredictable course, the cloud caused anxiety, in some instances
verging on panic. People searched for iodine tablets, they ceased
buying" fresh milk and fresh vegetables; travellers were checked
for radiation. They inundated government departments for safety-
advice. It became clear that the uncontrollable character of
nuclear fall-out, even on the relatively small scale of Chernobyl,
had exposed the psychological inability of people in general to
cope with it. The lesson was that a nuclear war, apart from its
physically destructive powers, would generate such hysteria that
there could be no organised response to it.
The people in Western Europe were thus receptive to the news
from Reykjavic that a nuclear arms control agreement was
possible. And they were dismayed when the meeting ended
without an agreement. But it was only in this narrowest of senses
that the meeting was a failure. It had three main positive aspects.
First, nuclear disarmament was brought quickly and dramatically
on to the world stage after years of seemingly mundane, endless
negotiations between the USA and the USSR. Secondly, it
clarified issues and positions which had been clouded and
confused by propaganda. 1986, the International Year of Peace,
indeed became the year of clarification about peace as a result of
the Reykjavic meeting. Lastly the negotiations at Reykjavic
highlighted changes in the Soviet approach both to world and
domestic politics and significantly modified the Western image of
the Soviet Union.
The process of clarification occured as the negotiations
unfolded. Mr Gorbechev submitted a package of proposals to
President Reagan which involved a 50 per cent reduction in
Soviet and American strategic offensive weapons over the next
five years to be followed by their complete elimination, the
removal of all intermediate range missiles from Europe, a
substantial reduction of those in Asia and a strict verification of
344
the nuclear weapons elimination process. Thus a significant
portion of the Soviet 15 January Peace Initiatives became the
subject of negotiations within reach of agreement. The proposals
which had been damned by silence suddenly became negotiable
issues.
On the other hand the Strategic Defence Initiative which had
been portrayed in the West as a defensive shield, a peaceful
protection against a pre-emptive nuclear strike, was seen as an
obstacle to peace. Mr Gorbachev made it quite clear that his
proposals comprised a package. On this, he said in his televised
speech to the Soviet people two days after the meeting had
ended:
"the third question I raised during my first conversation
with the President and that formed an integral part of
the package of our proposals, was the existing anti-
ballistic-missile (ABM) treaty and the nuclear test ban
treaty. Our approach is as follows: since we are
entering an entirely new situation, when a substantial
reduction of nuclear weapons and their elimination in
the foreseeable future will be started, it is necessary to
protect oneself from any unexpected developments.
We are speaking about weapons which to this day make
up the core of this country's defences. Therefore it is
necessary to exclude everything that could undermine
equality in the process of disarmament, to preclude any
possibility of developing weapons of the new type
ensuring military superiority. We regard this stance as
perfectly legitimate and logical. And since that is so, we
firmly stated the need for the strict observance of the
1972 ABM treaty of unlimited duration. Moreover, in
order to consolidate its regime, we proposed to the
President adopting a mutual pledge by the US and the
Soviet Union not to use the right to pull out of the
treaty for at least ten years while abolishing strategic
weapons within this period.
Taking into account the particular difficulties which the
Administration created for itself on this problem, when
the President personally committed himself to space
weapons, to the so-called SDI, we did not demand the
termination of work in this area. The implication was,
however, that all provisions of the ABM treaty will be
345
fully honoured - that is, research and testing in this
sphere will not go beyond laboratories. This restriction
applies equally to the US and the USSR."
The negotiations agreed on the elimination of all Cruise.
Pershing la and SS20 missiles from Europe and on scaling down
the number of SS20s in Asia. They could not agree, however,
over the scope of the ABM treaty. Mr Gorbachev, supported by
the American officials who drafted the treaty, 36 insisted that it did
not permit the testing and deployment of space weapons.
President Reagan took the opposite view. No agreement was
signed, The general reaction in Britain was that President Reagan's
support for the Strategic Defence Initiative prevented an historic
step being taken to eliminate nuclear weapons. Thereafter, SDI
was seen in a much more critical way than hitherto.
The Western media attention during the Reykjavic meeting
was concentrated on the person of Mr Gorbachev. It protrayed
the character of the Soviet Union through his personality. Mr
Gorbachev's ability to use the media, his so-called Western style
of public relations, his emphasis on technology and his concern
about democracy had already been noted with approval in the
West. He resembled, it was claimed. Western style political
leaders and was contrasted with the dour, secretive, authoritarian
and bureaucratic qualities attributed to his predecessors. In this
way the media image of Soviet society in general underwent
perceptible changes.
Mr Gorbachev made a sucession of concessions at the
Reykjavic meeting in order to reach agreement. He accepted an
earlier American 'zero option' proposal to eliminate all medium
range missiles in Europe and set aside the demand that British
and French missiles should be included in the agreement. He
agreed to more stringent measures of verification and discussed a
graduated approach to a comprehensive test ban treaty in
preference to the Soviet demand for an immediate ban. There
were contrasting interpretations of these compromises. The
Western political leaders claimed that their possession of nuclear
weapons had forced the Soviet Union into a negotiating position.
With twisted logic they argued that it was necessary for the West
to retain nuclear weapons in order to secure their elimination.
The wider public had a different view of Mr Gorbachev's
behaviour for by visibly struggling for an agreement he was seen
to be proving the sincerity of the Soviet Union. This impression
346
was reinforced by the concessions which were made to the US
position after the Reykjavic meeting. The Soviet Union put aside
its opposition to the Star Wars programme in a statement on 22
February 1987 in order to enable negotiations on an Intermediate
Range Nuclear Weapons treaty to proceed and when, in the
month of July, 1987, there was stalemate in the negotiations, the
Soviet leader again intervened to expedite an agreement.
The package of proposals under consideration by the arms
negotiators in Geneva included the retension of 100 missiles by
the Soviet Union in Asia while the USA retained a similar
number on its territory. There was some disagreement about the
location of the missiles because the US wanted to put its own in
Alaska, within striking distance of the Soviet Union, while the
Soviet Union had no means of locating its missiles within striking
distance of the USA. But this was not the sticking point. The
Soviet missiles were mobile and the US negotiators, forever
distrustful of the enemy, contended that this made the verifica-
tion of an agreement difficult for they could be transferred
between Europe and Asia as the Soviet authorities thought fit.
This argument was used to justify retaining missiles in West
Germany though in a covert way. West Germany possesses 72
Pershing la missiles with US nuclear warheads and with a range
of 750 kilometres. It claimed them as its own and insisted that
they should not be included in an agreement between the
USA and the USSR. The Soviet Union protested on the grounds
that the nuclear war-heads belonged to the USA and could not be
transferred to West Germany under the Non-Proliferation Treaty
of 1968. The Soviet leaders had no objection to the Pershing la
missiles remaining in West Germany without their nuclear war-
heads. This was the first sticking point. The second one was the
attempt by the USA to avoid destroying its European missiles by
relocating them to submarines. On both counts the West wanted
an agreement without seriously weakening its nuclear capability.
The Soviet Union could not accept that. But it did understand
that the fears of the West might stem from the mobile character of
the 100 missiles in Soviet Asia. Therefore, on 22 July 1987, Mr
Gorbachev stated in an interview with an Indonesian newspaper
that the Soviet Union would accept a "double-zero option 1 '
involving the destruction of the 100 missiles in Soviet Asia. It was
hoped that it would also remove doubts about verification. This
was a genuine concession because it was not tied to equivalent
disarmament moves by the US in Korea, the Philippines and the
347
Indian Ocean base of Diego Garcia where it has a nuclear
presence. Mr Gorbachev simply hoped that that presence would
not grow." The first sticking point was removed when in August
the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, stated that his
government would destroy its Pershing la missiles once an
agreement between the US and the Soviet Union had been
reached. Then on 18 September, 1987, President Reagan
announced that agreement had been reached in principle to
eliminate all medium-range land-based nuclear missiles and to
start fresh negotiations on nuclear testing. Thus the basis was laid
for signing an Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement late in 1987.
Mr Gorbachev proved the sincerity of the Soviet Union as he
removed each of the obstacles put by the West in the way of a
nuclear arms agreement. It was becoming patently clear that the
Soviet Union had decided that nuclear weapons had no military
significance and existed solely as a hazard to the world. Mr
Gorbachev's patiently presented series of concessions indicated,
moreover, the mood of the constituency he represented. The
Soviet people who know the horrors of war more than most,
want none of it. Those who have experienced war and those who
have grown up in its memory exert the pressures for an arms
settlement. They are not coerced into making concessions by the
possession of nuclear weapons by Britain and the USA but by the
nature of war itself. The Soviet people do not have an enemy
except war as a real, frightening destructive phenomenon. This
fact is now entering the consciousness of people in the West.
President Reagan's constituency, on the other hand, has raised
doubts in the minds of many people in the West. Mr Gorbachev
commented after the Reykjavic meeting that President Reagan
did not seem to be fully in command. "I saw what happened," he
said, "when he consulted with his officials ... he is not free to
take his own decisions'". He was flanked by a trio of advisers, Mr
Richard Perle, Mr Ken Adelman and General Rowny, who were
hawks in his administration and who spoke for those opposed to
an agreement. President Reagan's constituency contains millions
of ordinary people who want peace but it is dominated by the
arms manufacturers who profit from war. President Reagan's
advisers represented the interests of the latter. They sighed with
relief as the prospects of a settlement were set back and
applauded as each obstacle was raised. This too has begun to
enter the consciousness of people in the West.
The Soviet peace initiatives, the behaviour of Mr Gorbachev
343
and the democratising policies of the new Soviet government are
profoundly influencing international relations. They are not
simply altering the contours of the stereotype but are questioning
its existence. An enemy has to be perceived as unreliable and
devious otherwise it does not constitute a continuous threat. The
Soviet Union is seen not to behave like that any more. It is going
to be increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction that the Soviet
Union is the enemy.
The new influences impose equally new tasks on Western
Peace Movements, From 1979 till 1985 Peace Movements were
able to set policy aims which were beyond the demands of all
countries engaged in the arms race. At the same time they were
able to rail at the Soviet Union for not taking unilateral action or
initiating positive policies. The Peace Movements grew in that
period. The Soviet peace proposals combined with the events of
1986 and 1987 should have acted as an added stimulus through
clarifying the issues and widening the interest in disarmament but
this has not happened. Instead, Western Peace Movements have
declined in significance. Although the period is a critical one for
nuclear disarmament there is, in 1987, little popular agitation in
support of it. The reason lies in the dilemma the Soviet proposals
have created for the Western Peace Movements.
In the first place the Soviet Union has taken the initiative from
the Peace Movements in the struggle for disarmament. There is
nothing they can say which is in advance of what the Soviet Union
is prepared to do. Their most advanced policies are less than the
Soviet proposals. The main aim of CND, namely the removal of
Cruise missiles from Britain, and the primary goal of FND and
the Western European Peace Groups, namely a nuclear-free
Europe are being fulfilled through the Soviet initiatives.
In the areas where the Western Peace Movements still have a
relevance they have failed to make an impact. The British and
French governments are determined to retain their nuclear
weapons whether or not an agreement is reached between the
Soviet Union and the USA. The various Peace Movements have
made no impressions on this determination. CND has not been
able to persuade the British government to cancel the Trident
missiles even though there is apprehension within the ruling
Conservative Party about their cost. Ironically it could be the
failure of the British and French Peace Movements to tame the
nuclear aspirations of their own governments which stands in the
way of an effective agreement between the Soviet Union and the
349
USA, When Mr Gorbachev offered to exclude the British and
French missiles from the negotiations he assumed that world
opinion would force them into line. It is unlikely, however, that
the Soviet people will accept an agreement in the long-run which
removes Soviet missiles from Europe whilst permitting the British
and the French to keep theirs.
The Western Peace Movements still then have vital and
immediate tasks to perform even if the agreement at present
being negotiated is signed. Those nuclear weapons transported by
air and sea remain untouched. Many thousands of nuclear
warheads of all manner of types, less powerful and more powerful
than the Intermediate Range, must eventually be destroyed. No
Western Peace Movements have yet aspired to tackle that
problem. In order to do so they must agitate in support of the
Soviet proposals of 15 January 1986 for there is as yet no
preferable alternative policy. If they equivocate because they are
afraid of being described as pro-Soviet or refuse because they in
essence still see the Soviet Union as the enemy then they will be
missing, maybe spoiling, an historic opportunity to achieve real
universal nuclear disarmament.
FOOTNOTES
J . A Short History of the British Working Class Movement 1789-1947 by G D
II Cole. London. 1948. p. 352.
2. ibid. p. 353.
3. Britain Between the Wars by C I. Mowat. London. 1955, p. 537.
4. See TUC Repon. 1935. p. 175.
5. Sec The Origins of the Cold War by Marlin McCauley\ p. 60 and pp. Ill-
1 12; also Russia is for Peace by D N Pritt, 195.1, Chapter VIII.
6. David Cautc. op cit, p. 475.
7. ibid, p. 162.
8. The Life of Bertrand Russell by R W Clark. 1975, p, 525
9. ibid, p. 524.
10. ibid, p. 529.
11. ibid, p. 536.
12. ibid. p. 523.
13. Sage: A Life of J D Denial by Maurice Goldsmith, 1980. pp. 184-186.
14. The Visible College by Gary Werskey, London, 1978. p. 307.
15. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell 1944-67, p. 98, 1969. London.
16. Clark, op cit. pp. 543-547.
17. Werskey, op cit. p. 308.
18. see The Tamarisk Tree, Vol. 3, 1985. by Dora Russell.
19. ibid, p. 219,
20. The CND Story: the first 2.5 years of CND in the words of the people
involved, edited by John Minnion and Philip Bolsover T London, 1983.
350
21. Sec Eleventh Hour for Europe, papers by Ken Coates . . et aL edited by
Ken Coates, Nottingham, 1981.
22. Stated by E P Thompson in The CND Story, op cit.
23. In its Yearbook. See Not by Numbers Alone. Assessing the Military
Balance by Andrew Kelly, Peace Studies Paper, Bradford University.
Number 11 .
24. This point was emphasised by Jonathan Steele in The Limits of Soviet
Power, 1985, p.39.
25. Space Weapons and US Strategy. Origins and Development, by Paul B
Stares, p. 135.
26. The New York Times, 1 May 1986.
27. ibid.
28. The Guardian, 1 May, 1986.
29. ibid.
30. Soviet Weekly, 17 May. 1986, p. 4.
31. The New York Times, 1 May 1986.
32. ibid. 4 May 1986.
33. ibid. 3 May 1986.
34. The Guardian, 2 May 1986.
35. Quoted in The New York Times, 1 May 1986,
36. The Guardian, 14 October 1986.
37. As reported in, The Guardian, 23 July 1987,
351
Index of Names
A
Acheson, Dean, 231 , 238n
Adelman, Ken. 348
Akiner, Shirim, 62n, 203n
Alanbrooke, Field-Marshall Lord, 216
Allaun, Frank, 327
Allen, Lucy, xx
Allen, V L, 31 On, 31 In
Altshuler, Mordechai, 179n
Anderson, Barbara A, I37n
Andropov, Yuri, 124
Attica, 22
Attlec, Clement, 7, 10, 208, 211, 286
B
Baglai, Marat, xii
Baker, Howard. 253
Bandera, Stephen, 198
Baran, Paul A. 37, 38, 39. 40, 42n,
263n,264n
Baykov. Alexander, 27
Ben Guriun, David, 162
Bcnn. Tony, 8
Bcria, L. 93
Bernal, J D, 320, 321 , 322
Berstein, Edouard, 64, 270
Bettelhcim, Charles, 31, 42n
Bevin, Ernest, 211, 276,286
Birman. Igor, 158, 180n
Bblsover, Philip. 350n
Bondfield, Margaret. 272, 276
Bonner, Elena, 113
Bowman, Dave. 302
Bowie, Robert R. 236, 238n, 263n
Bramley, Fred, 273, 275, 276. 310n
Brezhnev, Leonid, 105, 122. 124, 125
Bridges, Harry. 296
Brown, Archie, 138n
Bryant, Arthur, 21 8n
Br'vm, Robert J, 153, 155, I78n, 179n,
180n
Brzczinski. Zbigniew, 79, 80, 81, 82,
83, 84, 85, 95, 97, 104, 107. 108, 109,
122, I38n. 233, 255, 256, 334
Bukharin. Nicholai, 67, 76, 94, 99, 118
Bukovsky, Vladimir, 102, 103
Bundy, McGeorge, 233, 235
Bunyan, James, 41n
c
Calhoun. Daniel F,310n
Carey, James, 290, 296
Carr, E H, xvii, xviii. 27, 42n, 54, 65,
I36n
Carrillo. Santiago, 32, 42n
Carter, Jimmy, 104, 105. 107, 108, 109,
234, 244, 246, 247, 255. 263n
Coute, David, 23n, 38, 39, 42n, 43n,
3lln,350n
Churchill, Winston, 6. 8, 9, 16, 17, 52,
207-217, 281 , 283, 284, 285. 286
Citrine, W M, 271. 275, 276. 277, 278,
281 i 282, 283, 284, 286, 289, 290,
310n
Clark, R W, 350n
Clvnes. J R, 271
Coates.Ken, 329, 351 n
Coates, W P, lOn, 23n, 282, 31 On
Coatcs, Zelda, lOn, 23n, 282, 31 On
Cole, GDH, 313, 350n
Conquest. Robert, 79, 80. 81. 32, 84,
85,95,97, 123
Crosland, CAR, 30, 42n
D
Dallin, D J,78, 81
Daniel, Yury, 102
Davies, Robert. 27, 42n
Dcakin, Arthur, 286, 287, 288. 290
Deutsche*, Isaac, 31 , 96
Dixon. Marlene, 43n
Dobb. Maurice. 27. 202n
Dubofsky, Melvin, 23n
Duff. Peggy, 323, 330
353
Duncan, Cynthia, [95
Dzevensky. Grigoriy, 167
£
Eden. Anthony, 9,210,286
Einstein, Albert, 322
Eisenhower, President Ike. 37, 39,41,
215, 233, 234, 239-243, 244, 247,
258, 259, 262, 263n. 319
Erickson, John, 27. 203n. 310n
Ezhov, N I, 77, 93, 94, 99, 119
F
Fainsod, Merle, 82, 83. 84, 123, 137n,
139n
Feather, Vic, 306
Feis, Herbert. 21 7n,218n
Ferraro, Gcraldine, 226
Ficldhouse, Roger T, 42n
Fleming, DF, 26l,264n
Ford, Gerald, 105. 244. 246, 247, 263n,
264n
Frank, Andre Gunder, 234, 235, 238n
Frankel, Jonathan, 180n
Friedgut, Theodore, 110, 113, 179n,
180n
Friedman, Milton, 34
G
Galenskov, Yuri, 102
Gaventa, John, 195
Getty, J Arch, 84, 85, 94. 98, 99, 136n,
138n, 139n
Gilbert, Martin, 179n
Gill, Ken, xx, 304
Gillman, Peter and Leni, 63n
Ginsburg, Alexander, 102
Ginsburg, G, 180n
Goldsmith, Maurice, 350n
Gorbachev, Mikhael, 52,74, 126. 127,
128, 132, I39n. 249, 251, 332,' 339,
344-346, 347, 348, 350
Green, William, 281, 291
Gromyko, Andrei, 151, 343
H
Halifax, Lord, 211
Hannington, Wal, 279
Harriman, Averill, 16, 80, 81
Harris, Jonathan, 139n
Hayek, F A von, 34, 42n, 52, 63n
Haynes, Viktor, 139n
Healcy, Denis, 8
Heyd'rich, Rcinhardt, 1.44
Hicks, George, 275
Hicks, Mike^ 102
Hilberg.Raul, 144, 179n
Hillman. Sidney, 284, 289
Hitler, 4. 61, 65, 82, 280, 334
Hoffa, Jimmy, 292
Hoffmann, Stanley, 236-237
Hook, Sidney, 39
Horner. A, 288
Howe, Irving, 31 In
Hutt, Allen, 310n
I
Tagoda,GG, 94, 99
J
Jacobs, Everett M, 180n
Jackson, Jesse, 223, 230
Jasny, N. 80, 81
Johnson, Hewlett, xvii
Johnson, Lvndon, 234, 235, 244, 246,
247, 263n, 264n
Joliot-Curie, Frederic, 320, 321 , 322
Jones, Bill, 279
K
Kaganovitch, L M, 93. 121, 122, 152,
157
Kahn, Albert A, I0n.23n
Kaldor, Mary. 330
Kamenev, Lev, 76, 77, 92, 157
Kaplan, Dora, 67, 76
Kaser, Michael, 138n
Kautskv. Karl, xvii, 64, 270
Kelly. Andrew, 35 In
Kennan, George F, 16, 17, 23n
Kennedy. John F, 37, 223, 234, 239,
243, 2*44, 245, 246. 247, 248, 263n.
264n
Kent, Bruce, 330
Keynes, John Maynard, 14, 23n
Khaustov, Victor, 102
Khrushchev, N, 93. 120, 121, 122,123,
124, 125, 129, 152, 322
Killian, James, 263
Kirov, SM, 76, 77,88,91,92
354
Kissinger, Henry, 104, 233, 244. 248
Klebannv, Vladimir, 111
Kohl, Helmut. 348
Kositsin, Alexander. 139n
Kosvgin, A N, 124
Kuznetsov, VV, 284, 289
L
Eafeber, Walter, 218n
Lane, David, 27, 42n, 188, 202n
Lapidus, Gail, W,202n
Lattimore. Owen, 39
Lawther, Will. 281, 288
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 43n
Lewis, Anthonv. 259
Lewis, John L, 291.292,293
Lewis, Helen, 195.203n
Lewis. Saunders, 190
Lenin, xvii. 4. 31. 64. 65, 66, 67, 68, 69,
70, 76, 77, 117, 129, 132, 136n, 157,
207. 270
Linden, Carl A, 139n
Litvinov, Pavel, 103
Lloyd-George, David, 4, 312
Locke, John, 53
Lockhart, R H Bruce. 23n
Logan. Sue, xx
Luxemburg, Rosa, 64, 270
M
McAulay, Mary, 27, 42n, I39n
McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 38, 40. 240
McCauley, Martin, 23n, 264n, 350n
McKee, Billy, 101
Malenkov, G, 93. 119, 120, 121, 122
Mandel, Ernest, 31
Mandel, William, 159, 179n
Marx, Karl, 30, 42n, 136n
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 117
Meachcr, Michael, 9
Medvedev, Roy, 82, 95. 97, 103, 110,
113, 115, 121, 136n, 139n
Medvedev, Zhores. 139n
Meir, Golda, 165
Melnik, Andrei, 198
Meyer, General Edward C. 256
Mikovan, A, 93
Mills, C Wright, 241,263n
Minnion, John, 350n
Moldea, Dan E, 311n
Mototov. Vvachcslav, 93. 97, 119, 121 ,
122
Morrison, Herbert, 150, 280
Mowat, C L, 350n
Murphv, J T, 273
Murray, Philip, 294, 297
Murray, Robert K,23n
N
Navasky, Victor S, 23n
Nezer, Z, 180n
Nicolaevsky. B I, 78, 81
Nicholas, Martin, 42n
Nicholas II, Czar, 13
Nikolaev, Leonid, 77
Nixon. Richard. 40, 104. 105, 107, 233,
234, 244, 246, 247, 248, 263n, 264n
Noulcns, M, 14, 23n
Nyc, Joseph S Jr, 236, 238n, 263n
o
Oppenheimcr, Robert J, 240. 317. 318
Orbach, William, 180n
Ordzhonikidze, G K, 97, 1 19
Orlov, Yury, 107
P
Papworth, Bert, 279
Perle, Richard, 348
Piatakov, Iu L, 77, 92
Pinkus, B, 180n
Podgorny, N V, 124
Popper. Karl, xvii, 34
Pritt, D N, 217n, 218n, 350n
Pugh, Sir Arthur, 278
Purcell. A A, 273
Quill, Michael, 293, 295
R
Rabi, Professor I, 25
Radck. K. 77, 92. 157
Reagan. Ronald, 11, 12. 109, 219.224,
226 , 233 . 234 , 244-245 , 246 , 247,
248. 250, 255, 258, 259, 263n, 334,
335. 339, 342, 344, 346, 348
Reddaway, Peter, 110, 138n, I39n
Reuther, Walter, 293, 295, 297
Ricardo, David, 53, 63n
355
Richardson, Elmo, 263n
Rigby,TH,81, 137n, I38n
Roberts, Cynthia, 138n
Roberts. Denis, 138n
Robeson. Paul. 59
Roosevelt, Franklin D, 16, 208-217.
224, 227, 228, 259, 284, 285
Rosefielde, Steven, 80, 81, I37n
Roscnhaft, Eve, 63n
Rostow, WW, 223,235
Rothstein, Andrew, 15, 23n, I36n,
138n
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 55
Rudzutak, Ian, 88
Runyantsev, Ivan Petrovitch, 92
Russell. Bertrand, 318-320. 322. 323.
327
Russell, Dora, 327, 350n
s
Saillanr, Louis, 285
Sakharov, Andrei, 79, 81, 103, 113,
114, 1 15
Sayers, Michael, lOn, 23n
Schcvenels, Walter, 31 On
Sehlesinger, Arthur, 233, 234
Schoenman. Ralph, 327
Schroeter, Leonard, I80n
Schultz, George, 248
Schwartz, Solomon M, 4 In
Sdobnikov. Yuri. lOn
Seidel.Gill, 179n
Seifert, Michael, xx
Semyonova, Olga, I39n
Shcharansky, Anatoly, 103, 107. 109
Shelepin, AN, 306
Sheppard, Canon 'Dick 1 , 314
Shipley, David K, 25
Sholokov, Mikhael, xvi
Silver, Brian D, 137n
Sinyavsky, Andrei, 102
Smith. Adam, 53, 63n
Smith, Dan, 330
Smith, Herbert, 277
Smith, Dr Steve. 21, 23n
Sokolorskiy. Marshall, 337
Solzhenitsyn. Alexander, 79. 80. 81.
103, 104, 115
Sorenson, Jay B, 4 In
Staley, Eugene, 223, 235
Stalin, Joseph, 32, 70, 71, 72, 77, 84, 91 ,
97, 98, 99, 118, 120, 123, 152, 157, 162,
210, 215, 217, 283, 284, 285, 322
Stares, Paul B, 263n, 264n, 351n
Steele, Jonathan. 351 n
Stimson. Henry, 215. 216
Sundquist, James L. 238n
Sverdlov, Jacob, 157
Sweezy, Paul, 31, 39, 42n, 263n, 264n
Swianiewicz, S, 80
Symnis, Senator Steven, 342
Szymanski. Albert, 23n. 27, 42n. 43n,
63n,85, 136n, 138n. 185, 202n
T
Taft, Philip, 297, 31 In
Tanner, Jack, 289
Taylor, A J P, xvii
Teller, Edward, 318
Tewson, Vincent, 286. 290
Thatcher, Margaret, 11
Thielens, Wagner, Jr. 43n
Thomas, J H, 271 , 276
Thompson, E P, 22, 35 In
Tillet, Ben, 272
Tokes, Rudolf L, 138n, 139n
Tomsky, Mikhail, 76, 118, 275, 277
Trotsky, Leon, 31, 32. 67, 71, 76, 92,
93, 94. 157
Troy, Ernie, 217n
Truman, Harry, 8, 37, 38, 39, 41 , 208-
217. 224. 233, 234, 239, 261, 263n.
295, 319
Trunk, Isaiah', 179n,203n
Tukhachevsky. Marshall, 77 , 93 , 95,
99
Turchin, Valentin, 114
Turner, Ben, 272
U
Ulam, Adam, 98
Ustinov, Peter, 159
V
Volkov, F, lOn
Voroshilov, Marshall K, 121
w
Wallace, Henry, 295
Wasserstein, Bernard, 179n
356
Webb. S and B, 127, 42n, 142. 151,
179n
Weinberger. Casper, 248, 25J
Werskey, Gary, 350n
Wheatcroft. S'G, 78, 85, 136n, 137n,
138n
White. Stephen. 31 On
Widick,B J, 31 In
Willis. Norman, 306
Wilmot, Chester, 209, 217n
Wilson, Harold, 105
Wvatt, Woodrow, 289
Wyman, David S, 149, l79n
X YZ
Yarmolinsky, Aviahm, I78n
Yeltsin, Boris, 343
Zaslavsky, Victor, 153, 155, 178n,
179n, I80n
Zhdanov, Andrei, 91, 97, 99, 119, 120,
122
Zinoviev. Grigori, 67, 71, 76, 77, 92,
94, 157, 277
357
Index of subjects
A
Abyssinia; 315
Academics; 24-43; advisers to US
Presidents, 233-238
Acheson-Lilienthal Report; 318
Adult Education and the Cold War
(Fieldhouse);42n
Afghanistan; 32, 234, 244
AFL-CIO; 297-299
Afro-American Labor Centre; 298
Agriculture; 121, 122, 142
Aldermaston March; 323
All-Union Central Council of Trade
Unions (Soviet); xi. 111,186, 273,
274, 275, 283, 284, 291, 293. 299,
305; delegations to Britain, 306;
financial offer in General Strike,
276
American Diplomacy (Kennan); 23n
American Federation of Labour; 14,
208, 281, 283. 284, 290, 291, 293,
297, 308
American imperialism; 229. 243, 245,
255, 286,
American Institute for Free Labour
Development; 298
American Jewish Committee: 166
American Jewish Congress; 166
American Jewish Lobby; 104-105
American people; attitude to politics,
221-226; culture of, 222-223; rep-
resented by Presidents, 219;
responsibility of, 220, 225; voting
practices of, 223-224
American-Soviet Trade Union Com-
mittee, 1945; 294
America Votes. A Handbook of
Contemporary American Election
Statistics; 230n
Amnestv International; 104, 111, 112,
113
Anglo-Russian Trade Union Com-
mittee; 275-277; dissolved after
General Strike, 277
Anglo-Soviet Agreement, 1941; 281
Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee,
1941; 280, 282-284,293, 301
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; 345-346
Anti-bureaucratic campaign; 85, 87,
89-92, 93-94, 96, 98
Ami-Comintern Pact, 1936; 93
Anti-Jewish violence; 142
Anti-Semitism; 140, 144, 146, 150, 151,
154, 156, 159, 167-168, 170, 176,
177, 178
Anti-Sovietism; xiii-xiv, xxi, 16, 34,
82 , 1 00 , 1 77 , 207 , 2 1 2 , 225 , 232 , 255 ,
267, 276, 282, 308, 309; and trade
unions, 267-311; Cold War phase
of, 285, 288, 290, 297, 300, 327; in
CND, 329-331, 332, 337, 338; self-
defeating for unions, 269
Anti-Soviet socialists; 28-33
Appaiachia; 194-195, 197,221
Arab states; 163
Arms Control Export Act of 1976,
105
Arms production; accelerated, 243;
the engine of US economy, 263; US
community dependence on, 251-254
Arms race; 19, 40, 336
Asian- American Free Labor Institute;
298
Atomic bombs; 215 , 240, 241, 243, 253,
285, 319, 321
Auschwitz; 148-149
Auschwitz and the Allies (Gilbert);
179n
Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
1944-67; 350n
B
Baruch Plan; 217, 218n, 318
Beating the Fascists (Roscnhaft); 63n
359
Bcrufsvcrbot; 42n. 135
Between War and Peuce (Feis); 217n
Birobidzhan, Soviet Jewish Homeland;
143
Black Circulars, (TUC); 279
Bolshevik government; 13-14
Bolshevik Party; 13, 67, 68, 70
Bolshevik Revolution; xi, xix. xx, 13,
55. 66, 68. 75. 116. 117. 182. 187.
198, 207, 212, 214, 271-272, 276.
285, 291.308.314
Bourgeois democracy; 65
Britain and Jewish imrnierants; 146-
148
Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution
(White); 310n
Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-
1945 (Wasserstein); 179n
Britain Between the Wars (Movvat);
350n
British Broadcasting Corporation; 146,
148
British Labour Delegation to Russia,
1920 Report; 310n
British Museum; 103
British Nationality Act of 3981 ; 59
British Peace Assembly; 326
British Peace Movement; 219
Bulletin on Soviet and East European
Jewish Affairs (Institute of Jewish
Affairs); 163
Bureaucratic inertia; 126
Business Week; 256. 257, 298
c
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament;
xii-xiii, 109. 312, 323-324, 326-331;
and nuclear parity, 332, 335, 340;
lost initiative, 349: mass member-
ship. 328
Capitalism; xiv, 28,30, 33.41, 135. 175,
214. 228, 260. 268, 309, 333; and
peace, 324-326; and war, 316-317
Capitalist; societies. 117-118; values,
35-36
Central Intelligence Agencv; 26, 232.
235,239,240,247
Centre tor Russian and East European
Studies; 27
Chekhov; 118, 127
Chernobyl; 306, 340-344; deaths at,
342-343; psychological consequences,
344; Western misrepresentation,
340-343
Che valine; 8. 9
Chistka; 86-89
Chronicle of Current Events; 103, 104
Churchill and the Bomb. A Study of
Pragmatism (Troy): 217n
Civil Rights Movement; 230
Civil War; 67, 68,73, 134, 182
Class structure; 75
Class Struggles in the USSR (Bcttel-
hcim); 42ri
Cold War: 1 7. 30. 36. 37, 39. 40. 77, 83.
101. 134, 152, 163, 175, 176 . 208,
209. 217, 232, 239, 272. 273, 321,
327; and British and American
unions. 285-290. 294-298. 306-307
Cold War liberals; 40
Collaboration: with German invaders.
197-199
Collar the Lot. How Britain Interned
and Expelled its Wartime Refugees
(Gillman);63n
Collective dissent; 57
Collective leadership; 124
Collectivism; 75, 130, 324
Collectivization of agriculture; 76. 86,
118,129.142
Colonialism; 187, 189, 195. 196
Colonialism in Modern America
(Lewis); 203n
Committee of 100; 327
Committees of People's Control; 132
Communism; 29-30, 37, 40, 52, 115,
232, 336
Communist Manifesto (Marx and
Engels); I36n
Communist Party; in Britain, 19, 280,
287, 315, 322, 327; in China. 31: in
Germany. 62; in the Soviet Union.
see under Soviet: in the US. 18. 38.
59, 297
Communist Party Membership in the
USSR 1917-1967 (Rigby); 137n
Communist Solar System (IRIS); 289
Communists; 286: attacked in US
unions , 295-297; in war, 283; popul-
arity of. 280. 289; post-war pro-
360
sription of, 287-289; union campaign
against, 277-280
Community politics in the US; 229-230
Complaints Bureaux: 132
Conditions of employment; 183
Conference on Security and Co-
operation in Europe, Final Act; 105
Congress of Industrial Organization;
284, 292. 293; and the Cold War,
294, 297, 308
Constitution; of Bolshevik Russia, 70;
of the Soviet Union, 71 , 72, 73, 90,
112, 130-131, 182,184-185,186-187,
190-191; of the US, 220, 231
Constitution of the Socialist State of
the Whole People (Kositsin); 139n
Council of Action; 271. 272
Criminal Code; in the Soviet Union,
100
Criticism; in the USSR, 129-133
Cruise missiles; 328, 335
Cymdeithas yr laith Gymraeg; 190
Czarist empire; 187, 189, 199
Czechoslovakia; xix, 32, 303-304, 309
D
Daily Herald; 273
Daily Mail; 56
Democracy; and emigration, 58-59;
authoritarian. 55; comparisons of,
133-136, English route to, 53-54;
French route to, 54-55 ; in the Soviet
Union, 64-139: in the West, 53-58,
60-62; Lenin's definition of, 64-65;
separation of economic from
political power, 60, 65; the Soviet
form of, xvii, 73-74, 115, 126, 127,
133-135; types of, 59-62, 213-214
Democracy or Disruption (Citrine);
278
Department for Visas and Registrations,
USSR, (OVIR); 166, 167
De-Stalinization; 121
Detente; 109. 236, 237. 244, 245, 285,
327, 334.
Dictatorship; 51, 65
Dictatorship of the Proletariat: 51,
65-67, 75
Dissent; amongst academics, 33-41;
and bureaucracy, 116, 134; and
minorities, 54, 55; during war, 56; in
the USSR, 74-76; in the West, 53-
58; repression of in the US, 17-19,
37-41 ; the cost of, 35-37
Dissent in the USSR (Tokes); 138n
Dissident movement in the USSR;
110, 112
Dissidents; 22, 100-117, 134-135; in
trade unions, 110-111; intellectuals
as, 113-115, 116-117; Jewish. 140;.
US concern about, 104
Divorce; in the Soviet Union, 185
Doctrine of Containment 1947 (Tru-
man); 261
"Drop-outs"; 168-169, 173
Draughtsmen's and Allied Technicians'
Association; 304
E
Einsatzgruppe; 143-144
Eleventh Hour for Europe (Coatcs);
35 In
Emerging technology; 329
Emigration; 56, 58-59, 100, 105. 107;
from the Soviet Union, 158-161,
168; moral argument against, 160;
pattern of Soviet Jewish, 168; the
right to, 109,150,174-176
Enemy; Soviet Union as, 3-10, 50, 236,
309, 315, 325, 349, 350
Essays in Persuasion (Keynes); 23n
Ethnic minorities; 186-195; in the
Soviet Union, 186-188, 190-194,
197-200; in the US. 194
Eurocommunism; 32-33
Eurocommunism and the State
(Carrillo);42n
European Jews; sec under Jews
European Nuclear Disarmament
(END); 329-33 1,349
European Peace Movement; 109, 262
European Trades Union Congress; 111.
306. 307
"Evil Empire"; xvi, 11, 13
Extermination centres; 145-146
Ezhovshchina; 77, 79, 80, 92-100; in
perspective, 94-100
F
Fanagalo; 189
361
Fascism; 34, 62, 279, 291, 315
"Final Solution"; 146
First Five Year Plan; 76, 86, 90, 118,
129, 141, 183
Forced Labour and Economic De-
velopment: an enquiry into the
experience of Soviet industrialization
(Swianiewicz); 80
Forced Labour in Soviet Russia (Dallin
and Nicolaevsky); 78
Forty-Five Years. International Feder-
ation of Trade Unions (Schevenels);
310n
Free Trade Union Association; 111,
112
Free Trade Union Institute; 298
French Revolution; 54
Friends Peace Committee; 323, 326
From Napoleon to Stalin (Carr); xviii
G
Gaelic; 189, 191
General Strike; 271, 275, 278, 279
German Democratic Republic; 305,
306
German invasion of Soviet Union; 82-
83, 101, 116, 143, 148, 160, 198, 200,
209-210,281,336
German Social Democratic Party; 270
Glasnost; 126, 128, 129
c 'Great Purge"; 77
"Great Terror"; 77
Green Party; 109, 331
Guardian, The; xix, 9, 10n,22n, 180n,
341, 342, 35 In
Gulag Archipeligo (Solzhenitsyn); 79,
136n
Gulag, the; 78
H
Hadassa; 172
Harvard University; 236
Hebrew; 163
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; 166,
172, 173, 174
Helsinki Declaration; 105-107
Higher Trade Union School, Moscow;
xii
Hiroshima; 317, 320
History of Anglo-Soviet Relations
(Coates); I0n,23n,310n
History of Soviet Russia (Carr); 42n
History of the USSR (Rothstein); 42n,
I36n, 138n
Holocaust; American response to,
149-150; news of, 148, 150
How Russia is ruled (Fainsod); 83, 139n
How to Secure Peace in Europe
(Roberts); 138n
Human rights; 102, 105, 107, 108, 135,
136, 140, 151, 164, 177, 181-202,
237; and imperialism, 196-202;
definition of, 181
Human Rights in the Soviet Union
(Szymanski); 23n, 27, 42n, 43n
Hungary; xix, 31, 301, 309, 322
Hydrogen Bomb; 318, 320, 321
I Search for Truth in Russia (Citrine);
3l0n
Images and Reality in the Soviet Union
(Allen); xiii, xviii
Immigration Control Procedures:
Report of a Formal Investigation
(CRE):63n
Imperialism, 196-202, 260; definition
of, 196
In Russia Now (Citrine); 310n
Individual freedom; 75
Individualism; 53, 57
Intellectuals; as dissidents, 113, 114,
115, 134; in Russian society, 116-117;
Western Jewish, 163
Inter-Church Peace Council (IKV);
331
Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty
(INF); 347, 348
International communism; 11-12, 17-
18,56,201,280,287,295,297
International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions; 111, 112, 290, 299-
300, 302, 304, 307, 309
International Federation of Audio-
Visual Workers 1 Union (FISTAV);
307
International Federation of Trade
Unions; 273, 274, 281 , 290, 291, 302
International Labour Organization;
111,304
362
International Longshoremen's and
Warehousemen's Union; 293, 296
International Miners" Organization;
307-308
International Peace Co-ordination
Centre; 331
International Rescue Committee; 166
International Socialist Congress, 1907;
313
International Trade Secretariats; 302.
307
International Union of Mine Mill and
Smelting Workers; 293, 295, 296
International Workers of the World;
308
Irish Catholics; 102, 136
Is the Red Flag Flying? (Szvmanski);
27, 42n
Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union
(Akiner);62n,203n
Israel; 103, 151, 159, 161, 162, 165,
166, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 176,
177
Israel and Palestine. Human Rights in
Israel and in the Occupied Territories
(END); I80n
Italy; 315
Izvestia; 133, 167
J
Japan; war against; 210, 213, 215, 285
Jewish Agency; 166, 168
Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution
(Trunk); 179n, 203n
Jewishness and anti-Semitism; 178
Jews; 100, 103, 104, 107 112, 135, 140-
180; and Jewishness, 153; and the
Bolshevik Revolution, 141-142; and
US immigration quotas, 147-148; as
Soviet partisans, 145; assimilation
of, 142, 152-158; distribution in the
Soviet Union, 153, 154; education
of, 155-156; emigrants as pawns.
177; emigration from the USSR,
158-161, 162-163, 168-174; hypoc-
risy of the British towards immi-
gration of. 146-148; in Czarist
Russia, 140-141; in the Soviet
Union during war, 143-146; mass
killing of by Germans, 144-145, 220;
membership of Communist Party,
157; Non-Ashkenazi, 154, 169-170;
population in the Soviet Union,
143, 153-154; "Rcfuseniks", 171;
social mobility of, 155; Soviet safe
areas for, 144; violence against, 142
Jolly George; 111
Journal of the Academic Proceedings
of So v iet Jew ry; 1 64
Journal of the Royal United Services
Institute for Defence Studies; 23n
K
Kentucky Economy. Review and Per-
spective; 203n
KGB; 22, 74, 124
Khrushchev, The Years in Power
(Medvedev); 139n
Khrushchev and the Soviet Leader-
ship (Linden); 139n
Khrushchev (Medvedev); I39n
Krefeld Appeal; 331
L
Labour Code; 130, 183
Labour Government; 7-8; 15, 211,
286,287,321
Labour Monthly; 310n
Labour Movement; 28, 280, 315, 316
Labour Party; 111, 210, 270, 271, 276,
313,315,323,328
Language; as symbol of power. 189-
192; in Scotland, 189-191; in the
Soviet Union, 190-192, 200; in
Wales, 189-190
Latin America: Underdevelopment or
Revolution (Frank); 238n
Law of Return (Israel); 162
Leadership; in the Soviet Union, 122-
123
League of Liberals Against Aggression
and Militarism; 312
League of Nations; 314, 315
Left Social Revolutionaries; 67, 70
Lenin Collected Works; I36n, I39n
Let History Judge (Medvedev); 82,
136n, 137n, 138n
Letter-writing; as criticism, 132-133
Lexington Herald-Leader; 264n
Liberal Party; 312
363
Library of Congress; 103
Libya; 340
Literacy; in Soviet Asia, 188
London bus strike, 1937; 279
London dockers; 271
M
Mail on Sunday; xviii
Man and Plan in Soviet Economy
(Rothstein);23n,42n
Maoist groups; 31
Marriage; in the Soviet Union, 185
Marshall Plan; 285, 290, 291, 294
Marxism: 30, 34
Mass arrests; 92, 97
Media: xi, 13. 52; and Chernobyl; 341-
343
Memoirs of a British Agent (Lockhart):
23n
Men and Work. An Autobiography
(Citrine); 3 lOn
Merisheviks; 67
Militarization of American Society;
253-254,255,258,262
Military-Industrial Complex: 221, 238,
241-243, 246, 258, 259, 262, 325
Military leaders; arrested in 1937, 93,
95. 98
Miners Federation of Great Britain;
276, 280; Soviet workers' support in
1926, 277
Miners' International Federation; 307
Miners' Strike of 1984; 101
Monopoly Capital (Baran and Sweezy);
263n,264n
Moral Majority Movement; 230
Morning Star; xi
Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group;
107
Moscow News; 139n
"Moscow Trials"; 92-94, 99
Multinational arms companies; 261-
262,325,348
My American Diary (Citrine); 3l0n
My Russia (Ustinov); 180n
Myths; about the Soviet Union; 21
N
Nagasaki; 317, 320
Naming Names (Navasky); 23n
National Conference on Soviet Jewry;
104
National Council for Soviet Jewry; 166
National Minority Movement; 278
National Security Assistant; 233
National Security Council; 233. 247.
248
National Security Document 68, 1950;
239, 24*
National Union of Mineworkers; 111,
268,288, 289,301.307
Nationalism; 197-199
Nationality Amendment Law, 1971
(Israel): 162
Native Americans; 194, 229
NATO; xii. 20, 21, 22. 135. 231, 234.
243, 328-329,334,335
Nazism; 34, 62, 1 16. 167. 220. 315
New Deal; 40, 57, 227, 259. 291
New Economic Policy; 66, 1 18, 141
New Left; 32, 322
New York Times; 25, 41n, 146, 217n,
227, 230n. 249, 251 , 259, 263n. 264n,
35lii
NKVD;77,92,94, 143
Non-AshkanaziJews; 154, 158, 169-170
Non-Proliferation Treaty 1968; 347
Northern Ireland; 101-102, 136, 200
Not by Numbers Alone. Assessing the
Military Balance (Kelly), 35 In
Nuclear parity; 332-338
Nuclear war; xii, 21, 22, 25, 152, 232,
248,257,317,323,344
Nuclear weapons; xii, xv, 6, 19, 20, 21,
239, 258. 262. 317, 325, 326, 332,
340, 346, 348
Nuremburg Trials; 220-221
o
On Soviet Dissent (Medvedev); 139n
On the Transition to Socialism (Sweezy
and BetEelheim); 42n
One-Party State; 67-74
Operation Proud Spirit; 255-256
Opinion forming; 25
Organized Labor in American History
(Taft);3lln
Origins of the Purges. The Soviet
Communist Party Reconsidered,
1933-1938 (Getty); 84, I36n
364
Our Own Worst Enemy ( Highlander);
263n. 264n
P
Pale of Settlement; 140. 155
Palestine; 148, 149
Palestinian detainees; 177
Peace activity; and capitalism, 324-
326; during Boer War, 312; hamp-
ered in the US, 318
Peace Ballot; 314-315
Peace Conference (Leeds) 1917; 314,
316
Peace groups; 321; 'unofficial', 331
Peace Movement; and capitalism, 325-
326; and nuclear parity. 337-338, in
Britain, 323-324; in the Soviet Union,
xii; lost initiative, 349; remaining
tasks, 349-350
Peace Pledge Union; 314, 323
Perestroika; 126-128,338
Personalities; role in history, 207-208
Phoenix 1966, 102
Pogroms; 140, 142. 144
Poland; xix, 32, 112, 271, 272, 282,
304-305, 306, 307,309
Polaris; 8> 244
Politbureau, changes in, 123-124
Political corruption; in the US, 223,
226
Political executions; 77, 78, 93, 94, 97
Political prisoners; 79, 101. 108-109
Political proscription; 279
Politics and Society in the USSR (Lane);
202n
Politics and the Soviet Union (Mc-
Auley); 42n
Post-Revolutionary Society (Sweezy);
42n
Post-War History of the British Work-
ing Class (Hutt); 31 On
Potsdam Agreement; 212, 321
Potsdam Conference; 207-218, 285,
286; difference between British and
US attitudes, 211 ; nuclear posturing
at, 215-217
Poverty; 184, 187; in Appalachia, 195
Power and Power lessness. Quiescence
and Rebellion in an Appalachian
Valley (Gavcnta); 203n
Power and Principle. Memoirs of the
National Security Adviser 1977-1 981
(Brzezinski); 138n
Pravda;%,9\, 120, 133, 167
Prejudice; against Soviet Union, xviii-
xix, 338; by Bcrtrand Russell, 319
Present at the Creation: My Years at the
State Department (Acheson); 238n
Presidents of the US; 219; choice of
advisers, 232-233; elections of, 224;
knowledge of foreign affairs, 233-
234; power of, 231, 232, 259;
rhetoric of, 243-245; served by-
academics, 234-238
Prevention of Terrorism Act; 102, 136
Prisoners of Conscience in the USSR:
Their Treatment and Conditions
(Amnesty International); i04, 138n
Proceedings of the Sixth International
Congress of Celtic Studies; 190, 202n
Progressive Party; 295
Proletarian democracy; 64-65, 67
Proverka; 86, 88-89
Public Order Acts; in Western
countries, 101
Purges; 76-100
Q
Quotas; for Soviet Jewish emigrants,
1 7 1 ; in the US for Jewish immigrants,
147-148
R
Radio Liberty; 103, 165
Rank and File Movement; 278, 279
Rainbow Coalition; 230
Recent History of the Labour Move-
ment in the United States 1939-1965
(Progressive Publishers); 31 in
Red Army; 5, 6, 77, 198, 199, 209, 210,
261, 272, 274, 280, 282. 284, 288
Red International of Labour Unions;
273, 276
Red Scare; 214,328
Red Scare. A Study in National
Hysteria (Murray); 23n
"Red Terror 1 '; 68, 76
"Refuseniks"; 171
Repatriation from the USSR; 160-161
365
Reykjavik summit; 339, 344, 347, 348
Right Opposition; 118
Right Social Revolutionaries; 68
Right ro Work; 182-184
Right to Work Laws; in the US, 228
Russell Appeal; 329-330
Russell Peace Foundation; 329, 331
Russia (TUC) 1924; 310n
Russia is for Peace (Pritt); 217n, 218n,
350n
Russian Social Democratic Labour
Party; 270
s
Sage: A Life of J D Vernal (Goldsmith);
350n
Samizdat; 102, 103
Samizdat Archive; 103. 165
Science for Peace; 320
Scientists; and nuclear war, 317-319;
for peace, 320-322; Pugwash Con-
ference, 322
Scorched earth policy; 209, 213
Scottish Trades Union Congress; 302
Second front in the Second World
War; 283,316
Second World War; xxt. 6, 11, 34, 61,
73. 114, 134. 143. 159, 160. 170, 197-
199, 207. 212, 219. 220, 226. 231.
255, 258, 261, 272, 316; and the
Soviet Union, 280-284
Secrets from Whitehall and Downing
Street (\o\kov); lOn
Self-criticism in the USSR; 73. 91.
128-129
Sexism; 186
Short History of the British Working
Class Movement 1789-1947 (Cole);
350n
Six Day War; 103, 143, 163, 170, 172
Slavic Review; 137n, 139n
Smolensk Archive; 82-84
Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (Fainsod);
83, 137n
Social democracy; 28-31
Socialism; 126, 135, 260. 261, 268,
269, 284, 333
Socialism and Capitalism: Score and
Prospects (Sdobnikov); lOn. 202n.
203n
Sociological Inquiry; 43n
Solidarity; in Poland, 112. 304-305,
307. 331
South Africa; 114, 168, 181 , 221
Soviet Asia; 187-188, 200, 347;
education, 193; health care, 193;
literacy in, 188
Soviet but not Russian (Mandcl); 179n
Soviet Committee on Human Rights;
113
Soviet Communism. A New Civiliza-
tion 7 (Webb};42n, 179n
Soviet Communist Party; xii. 51, 67-74,
84, 97-98, 125, 129-130, 131, 199,
201; expulsion from, 77-80, 86-89.
96, 99; factions in. 76, 84; member-
ship, 81, 88. 96-97; opposition in. 71,
117-129; records, 83; role of, 119-
120
Soviet Economic Development Since
79/7(Dobb);42n,202n
Soviet elections: 90, 91
Soviet-German Non- Aggression Pact;
280
Soviet Jewish Affairs; 136n, 163-164,
179n, 180n
Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet
Nationality Policy (Zaslavsky and
Brym); 178n
Soviet Jews; see under Jews
Soviet Labour Camps; 78-81, 102
Soviet Muslims; 48
Soviet Peace Proposals; 217, 251, 338-
340, 345
Soviet Penal Code; 78
Soviet studies; 26
Soviet Studies; IS, 136n, 137n, 138n
Soviet Union; and the Second World
War, 280-285; and the "dictatorship
of the proletariat", 66-67; at
Potsdam, 207-217; collaboration
with Germans in, 198-199;
condemned over Chernobyl, 342;
diplomatic recognition of, 15;
dissidents as an opposition in, 113;
emergence as world power, 285;
employment in, 182-183; ethnic and
linguistic complexity, 47-51;
German invasion of, 83, 101, 116,
143, 148, 198, 209-210, 212-213,
366
281; human rights in, 181-202;
intimidation of Jewish intellectuals
in, 152-153; languages in, 47, 190-
192; living standards in, 184; mis-
representation of. xi, xii, xv-xvi, 16-
17. 24. 40, 50, 51-52, 272, 273, 319,
338; problem with dissent, 115-116;
relationship with US since 1945,
333-334; size of, 48-50; support for
Israel, 151; takes peace initiative,
349-350; under siege, 70
Soviet Weekly; 180n, 35 In
Sovietologists: 77, 78, 84, 1 13
Soweto; 114,221
Space expenditure in the US; 247-248
Space Weapons and US Strategy.
Origins and Developments (Stares) ;
263n,264n, 35 In
Spanish Civil War; 316
Special Category Prisoners; 101-102
Special mobile death units; 143-144
Sputnik 1; 240, 243, 245. 246, 323
Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-
Communist Manifesto (Rostow):
235
Stakhanovite movement; 73, 96
Stalin: A Politial Biography (Dcuts-
cher); 138n
Statin: The Man and his Era (Ulam);
138n
Stalinism; 83-84
"Star Wars" speech by President
Reagan; 248, 250
Statistical Abstract of the United States;
230n
Slereotvpe of the Soviet Union; xiii,
xix, 11-23, 24, 26, 27, 41 , 50, 74, 80,
114,117,280,294,329
Stockholm Institute for Peace Re-
search; 337
Stockholm Peace Appeal; 321
Strategic Defence Initiative; 6-7. 248-
251, 335, 345-346; contracts and
contractors, 249-250; expenditure
on, 248: profits from, 250, 251 , 252:
spread of contracts, 252-254
Structural functionalism; 123
Subbotniks; 73
Subcontracting in arms industry; 253-
254
T
Taft-Hartley Act of 1947; 38, 226, 228
Tehran Conference; 210
The Abandonment of the Jews. America
and the Holocaust; 1941-45 (Wvman);
179n
The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923
(Carr); 136n
The CND Story: the first 25 years of
CND in the words of the people
involved (Minnion and Bolsover);
350n, 35 In
The Cold War and Its Origins
(Fleming); 264n
The Collectivization of Soviet Agri
culture 1929-1930 (Davies); 42n
The Decline and Resurgencne of Con-
gress (Sundquist); 238n
The Destruction of the European Jews
(Hilberg); 179n
The Future of Socialism (Crosland);
30, 42n
The Future of Underdeveloped
Countries (Stalcy) ; 235
The Great Conspiracy Against Russia
(Savers and Kahn); I On, 23n
The Great Fear (Caute): 23n, 42n, 31 In
The Great Terror (Conquest); 79,
136n, 137n
The tioffa Wars (Moldea); 31 In
The Holocaust Denial (Seidcl); 179n
The Jews and other National Minori-
ties under the Soviets (Yarmolinsky);
178n
The Life of Bertrand Russell (Clark);
350n
The Life and Death of Soviet Trade
Unionism, 1917-1928 (Sorenson);
41n
The Limits of Soviet Power (Steele);
351n
The Longer View (Baran); 42n
The Making of America's Soviet Policy
(Nye);236,238n, 263n
The Militancy of British Miners
(Allen); 311n
The Origins of the Cold War (Mc-
Cauley);23n,264n,350n
The Origins of the Cold War 194T
1947 (Lafeber);218n
367
The Origins of Forced Labour in the
Soviet State, 1917-1921 (Bunvan):
41x1
The Peril in our Midst (Wyatt); 289
The Permanent Purge (Brzezinski);
79, 139n
The Power Elite (Mills); 263n
The Presidency of D wight D Eisen-
hower (Richardson); 263n
The Principles of Political Economy
(Ricardo);63n
The Restoration of Capitalism in the
USSR (Nichoias) ;42n
The Road to Berlin (Erickson); 27,
203n
The Road to Serfdom (Hayek); 34,
42n, 63n
The Road to Stalingrad (Erickson);
27, 3 1 On
The Russian Revolution of 1905. The
Workers Movement and the Form-
ation of Bolshevism and Menshev-
ism (Schwarz); 41n
The Socialist Sixth of the World (John-
son); xvi
The Soviet Collective Farm 1929-1930
(Davics);42n
The Soviet Impact on the Western
World (Carr); xvii, xviii, 42n, 63n,
136n
The Soviet Industrial Worker (Lane
and O Udl);42n
The Soviet Union Since the Fall of
Khrushchev (Brown and Kaser);
138n, 139n
The Struggle for Europe (Wilmot);
217n
The Tamarisk Tree (Russell); 350n
The Times; xviii, 278. 334, 335
The TUC and Communism (TUC);
311n
The UAW and Walter Reuther (Howe
andWidick);311n
The United Front (Calhoun); 310n
The Visible College (Werskey); 350n
The Wealth of Nations (Smith): 63n
Third World countries; 193, 196, 200,
201.202,230,239,298
Three Mile Island nuclear disaster;
341
To I sto y Fou nd a ti on ; 1 66
Totalitarianism; 132
Trade Union Leadership (Allen); 31 In
Trade Unions; and anti-Sovietism,
267-311; as antithesis of capitalism,
267-268: British and Soviet relations,
299-308; British unions and the
Bolshevik Revolution, 271-272;
delegations to Russia, 272-273;
freedom of. 57, 112, 131-132; in the
Soviet Union, 4 In; in the US, 228-
229, 290-299; pragmatism of British
unions, 269-270
Trade Unions and the Government
(Allen); 310n
Trades Councils; 278-279
Trades Union Congress; 111, 112, 268.
271 . 273, 274; aims for respectability.
277-278; and Solidarity, 304-305;
and 1968 Czechoslovakian crisis,
303-304; campaign against com-
munists, 278-280; during the Cold
War, 285-290, 300; General
Council, 276, 277; relations with
AUCCTU, 280, 282, 283, 284, 306;
response to Hungarian crisis, 301-
302
T.U.C. Reports; 139n, 3l0n, 31 In
Transport and General Workers'
Union; 268, 286, 287, 289, 301 , 327
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 1918, 314
Triumph in the West (Bryant); 218n
Trotskyists groups; 31, 88
Trud; 133. 167
Turkey; 135-136
Twentieth Congress of the CPSU; 121
u
Uncensored Russia (Reddawav); 138n
Unemployment; 135, 182-183' 194
Unilateral moratorium on nuclear
tests; 332, 339
Unilateral nuclear disarmament; 323,
327, 328
United Automobile Workers; 293, 295
United Electrical, Radio and Machine
Workers of America; 292. 295. 296,
297
United Mine Workers of America;
226, 291-292. 296. 299
368
United Nations, 181. 196, 285, 318
United Nations Declaration of Human
Rights; 175
United States; and Jewish immigrants,
147-148; anti-communist role of,
244; Battle Act of 1951, 232;
community politics in, 229-230;
Congress House Committee on Un-
American activities, 38; Constitution,
220, 231; expenditure on arms, 245,
248; Export Control Act, 231;
immigrants to, 225; immigration
laws, 59; intervention in Vietnam,
135; in the immediate post-Second
World War. 214; Laws on Internal
Security, 11-12; MeCarron Act of
1950, 38, 58-59; nuclear posturing
by, 215-217; political language of,
227-228; Presidential elections, 224;
Presidents of, 219, 231, 232;
registration of black and white
voters. 223-224; relationship with
USSR since 1945, 333-334;
repression of academic dissent in,
37-41; Senate Internal Security Sub-
Committee, 38; Senate Permanent
Sub-Committee on Investigations,
38; Smith Act of 1940. 38; Trade
Reform Act of 1972, 104
Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, 1948:181, 196
V
Vietnam War; 135. 225, 229. 234,236,
243, 244, 245, 253, 257, 304
Voice of America; 164-165
Voice of Israel; 165
Vyzov; 166, 168. 169, 170, 171, 172
w
Wage Labour and Capital (Marx) ; 42n
Wansee Conference; 146
War casualties; 6, 7, 314
War of Intervention; 4, 5, 15, 67, 114,
182
Wars; 3, 6; and capitalism, 316-317;
mobilization for, 254-258; nuclear,
25, 152, 232, 235, 248, 257, 317;
peace activity during, 312-314
Washington Post; 264n
Week of the Broken Glass; 220
Welsh; 189-190
Welsh Language Society; 190
We Shall Be Alt: A History of the
Industrial Workers of the World
(Dubofsky);23n
West Germany; 347, 348
Western democracies; 56, 57, 58, 59,
60,61,62,67,213
White Russian Terror; 71, 142
Women in Soviet Society (Lapidus);
202n
Women; involvement in trade unions,
186; position in Soviet Union, 184-
186
Working class; 65, 66, 67, 72, 73, 74.
75, 116, 213,228,313
World Congress of Intellectuals, 1948:
321
World Federation of Scientific
Workers; 321
World Federation of Trade Unions;
274, 293, 294, 300, 301, 302, 304,
306; demise of, 289-290, 299-301;
formation of, 284-285
World Jewish Congress; 166
World Military Expenditure and Arms
Transfer (US);263n
World Peace Council; 321, 331
X YZ
Yalta Agreement; 200
Yalta Conference; 209, 285
Yiddish; 143, 152, 153, 158
Yom Kippur War; 151, 172, 244. 246
Young Communist League; 131
"Zinoviev" letter; 15
Zionism: 100, 142-143, 151, 152,
161-163, 178; attacked by USSR,
167-168, 176; propaganda of , 164-165
369
Vic Allen is the Professor of the Sociology
of Industrial Society at the University of
Leeds. He specialises in the comparative
study labour movements and he has first
hand knowledge of the USA and the Soviet
Union as well as Britain, which are the
■countries which figure in this book. He is
currently engaged in a study of dissent in the
USA, based on an analysis of Appalachian
coal miners, and he is completing a book
about Soviet trade unions. Amongst his
many publications are Social Analysis and
The Militancy of British Miners
Vic Allen has been an activist in the British
Labour Movement since he joined the
Amalgamated Union of Building Trade
Workers at the age of ] 7 years. The focus of
his activities has been trade unions, in
particular the National Unior. of Mine-
workers with which he has had a close and
longstanding relationship. In parallel with
that he has been a member of the Peace
Movement, the other main area of insti-
tutionalised anti-Sovietism, starting with
the first Aldcrmaston Peace March in 1958.
Since 1980 he has been active in the Peace
Movement as a writer and lecturer and for
three years from 1983 was a member of
CND's National Council. He is presently
vice-chair of Shipley CND.
Photograph by the. Photographic Department of the
University of Leeds.
ALSO by V. L. ALLEN
SOCIAL ANALYSIS: A Marxist Critique and Alternative
ISBN 0 907698 02 6 Paperback Price £7.95
THE MILITANCY OF BRITISH MINERS
ISBN 0 907698 01 8 Paperback Price £<S 00
ISBN 0 907698 00 X Hardback Price £12.00
Published by THE MOOR PRESS, Bank House, Baildon Green, Yorkshire^ 1 7 5JA. GB
Live Music
Archive
Librivox
Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Internet
Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American
Libraries
TV News
Understanding
9/11